EDUCATION FOR CRITICAL CONSCIOUSNESS. Paulo Freire

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2 EDUCATION FOR CRITICAL CONSCIOUSNESS Paulo Freire

3 For Carolina Continuum The Tower Building II York Road London SE I 7NX I 5 East 26th Street New York NY Copyright 1974 by Sheed & Ward Ltd First published 1974 This edition 2005 All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying or otherwise, without prior permission in writing from the publisher. British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library ISBN X Typeset by RefineCatch Limited, Bungay, Suffolk Printed and bound in Great Britain by Antony Rowe, Chippenham, Wiltshire

4 Contents Introduction by Denis Goulet vii Education as the Practice of Freedom Society in Transition 3 Closed Society and Democratic Inexperience 19 Education versus Massification 29 Education and Conscientiza<;ao 37 Postscript 53 Appendix 55 Preface to "Extension or Communication" by Jacques Chonchol 79 Extension or Communication 85 v

5 Introduction To think dialectically is to decree the obsolescence of cherished concepts which explain even one's recent past. One of the marks of a true dialectician, however. is the ability to "move beyond" the past without repudiating it in the name of new levels of critical consciousness presently enjoyed. No contemporary writer more persistently explores the many dimensions of critical consciousness than Paulo Freire, a multi-cultural educator with the whole world as his classroom notwithstanding the totally Brazilian flavor of his emotions, his language, and his universe of thought. Freire never tires of looking for new forms of critical consciousness and unearthing new links between oppression in a variety of settings and the liberating effects of "conscientizac;ao." The unifying thread in his work is critical consciousness as the motor of cultural emancipation. The publication in English at this time of two essays written by Freire in 1965 and 1968, respectively, aims at recapturing for U.S. readers what Paulo Freire calls the "naivete of his thought" at the time of writing. Faithful to the historicity of human experience, Freire refuses to disown, even while transcending, his past writings and actions. If such fidelity troubles readers who would make of "conscientizac;ao" or of Freire himself a myth or an object of consumption, so be it! Freire is the first to rejoice in thus gaining a new weapon against mystification. "Education as the Practice of Freedom" grows out of Paulo Freire's creative efforts in adult literacy throughout Brazil prior to the military coup of April L 1964, which eventually resulted in his exile. Were the piece to be written today, I feel certain that its title would become "Education as the Praxis of Liberation." For although Freire's earlier work vii

6 INTRODUCTION does view action as praxis, the precise symbiosis between reflective action and critical theorizing is the fruit of later works, especially Cultural Action for Freedom and Pedagogy of the Oppressed. Similarly, Freire's notion of freedom has always been dynamic and rooted in the historical process by which the oppressed struggle unremittingly to "extroject" (the term is his) the slave consciousness which oppressors have "introjected" into the deepest recesses of their being. Yet in recent years Freire has grown ever more attentive to the special oppression masked by the forms of democratic "freedom" or civil "liberty." Accordingly, he now emphasizes liberation as being both a dynamic activity and the partial conquest of those engaged in dialogical education. American readers of Pedagogy of the Oppressed will find in "Education as the Practice of Freedom" the basic components of Freire's literacy method. These elements are participant observation of educators "tuning in" to the vocabular universe of the people; their arduous search for generative words at two levels: syllabic richness and a high charge of experiential involvement; a first codification of these words into visual images which stimulate people "submerged" in the culture of silence to "emerge" as conscious makers of their own "culture"; the decodification by a "culture circle" under the self-effacing stimulus of a coordinator who is no "teacher" in the conventional sense, but who has become an educator-educatee-in dialogue with educatee-educators too often treated by formal educators as passive recipients of knowledge; a creative new codification, this one explicitly critical and aimed at action, wherein those who were formerly illiterate now begin to reject their role as mere "objects" in nature and social history and undertake to become "subjects" of their own destiny. They now perceive their own illiteracy as the cultural artifact of those who would oppress them. This is a first release from those written words which their oppressors had kept imprisoned in the magic tool-box of those present-day sorcerers, the stewards of the culture of silence. One spontaneously thinks here of Levi-Strauss as he discusses the special awe, almost religious in character, experienced by primitives in the presence of those who master the arts of writing. Education in the Freire mode is the viii

7 INTRODUCTION practice of liberty because it frees the educator no less than the educatees from the twin thraldom of silence and monologue. Both partners are liberated as they begin to learn, the one to know self as a being of worth-notwithstanding the stigma of illiteracy, poverty, or technological ignorance-and the other as capable of dialogue in spite of the strait jacket imposed by the role of educator as one who knows. Paulo Freire's central message is that one can know only to the extent that one "problematizes" the natural, cultural and historical reality in which s/he is immersed. Problematizing is the antithesis of the technocrat's "problem-solving" stance. In the latter approach, an expert takes some distance from reality, analyzes it into component parts, devises means for resolving difficulties in the most efficient way, and then dictates a strategy or policy. Such problem-solving, according to Freire, distorts the totality of human experience by reducing it to those dimensions which are amenable to treatment as mere difficulties to be solved. But to "problematize" in his sense is to associate an entire populace to the task of codifying total reality into symbols which can generate critical consciousness and empower them to alter their relations with nature and social forces. This reflective group exercise is rescued from narcissism or psychologism only if it thrusts all participants into dialogue with others whose historical "vocation" is to become transforming agents of their social reality. Only thus do people become subjects, instead of objects, of their own history. Such language may appear unduly Promethean to those who fear ecological disaster or who seek to reinstate a Zen, Tao, or Sufi contemplative posture as a corrective to the over-active West. But Freire is no ethnocentric reductionist: he knows that action without critical reflection and even without gratuitous contemplation is disastrous activism. Conversely, he insists that theory or introspection in the absence of collective social action is escapist idealism or wishful thinking. In his view, genuine theory can only be derived from some praxis rooted in historical struggles. This is the reason why Freire cannot be the theorist of social revolution in the United States, although many of his hearers unconsciously try to cast him in this role. Only those who are historically "immersed" in the complex forms of oppression taken by life in the United States can identify the special garb worn by "cultural silence" in this society. Clearly it is not illiteracy, as in northeast Brazil, or economic marginalization as in rural Chile. What is it, then, that blocks oppressed Americans from controlling their own social destiny? Is it the lack of certain skills, or the inability to ix

8 INTRODUCTION manipulate the law to their own ends, as the dominant classes do with impunity? Is it faulty ideology or the inability to organize locally beyond mere self-interest? Or is it because the psychic boundaries between oppressors and oppressed in the United States are so fuzzy? Do most Americans recognize themselves as either oppressed or oppressors, or do they see themselves as inert beneficiaries, and thereby passive connivers, in impersonal structures of oppression? And are racism and sexism in this society manifestations of what Freire, echoing Mao, calls the "principal contradiction" or merely, as he suggests, "principal aspects of the principal contradiction"? These and similar questions must be answered-in a dialectical way which grows from praxis and which generates theory-before Paulo Freire's "method" can be applied to the United States. The futility of looking to the Freire "method" as a panacea is dramatized in this volume's second essay, "Extension or Communication." This work, written in Chile in 1968, applies the lessons of "conscientiza<;ao" to a domain of vital importance in Latin America, namely, rural extension. Extension workers and county agents are familiar figures on the U.S. rural landscape; they bring advanced techniques and products developed in agricultural schools and land-grant colleges to the farmers. And in recent decades, rural extension on the U.S. model has spread throughout Latin America. In many areas, extension stands as the epitome of technical assistance. Nevertheless, as he analyzes the terms "extension" and "communication," and the realities underlying them, Freire detects a basic contradiction between the two. Genuine dialogue with peasants, he holds, is incompatible with "extending" to them technical expertise or agricultural know-how. Consequently, "Extension or Communication" cannot be read as a specialized tract of interest only to rural people. On the contrary, it has general significance precisely because it demystifies all "aid" or "helping" relationships. What the author says of extension agents he might also say of social workers, city planners, welfare administrators, community organizers, political militants, and a host of others who allegedly render "services" to the poor or the powerless. Freire insists that methodological failings can always be traced to ideological errors. Behind the practice of agricultural extension, he sees an (implicit) ideology of paternalism, social control and non-reciprocity between experts and "helpees." If, on the other hand, one is to adopt a method which fosters dialogue and reciprocity, one must first be ideologically committed to equality, to the abolition of privilege, and to non-elitist X

9 INTRODUCTION forms of leadership wherein special qualifications may be exercised, but are not perpetuated. In rejecting the language and practice of extensionism, therefore, Freire does not negate the value of bringing agricultural technology or skills to peasants. But he asserts that those who have such knowledge must engage in dialogue wherein they may learn, together with peasants, how to apply their common partial knowledge to the totality of the problematized rural situation. Implied here is the judgment. which Freire makes unequivocally, that there can be no valid "aid" and that there is no room in development language for the terms "donors" and "recipients." For this reason, therefore, "Extension or Communication" may strike readers in this country as a radical attack on U.S. foreign-aid policy and U.S. treatment of the domestic "poverty" issue. This exegesis of the oppressive character of all non-reciprocal relationships can best be read in tandem with Pedagogy of the Oppressed and Cultural Action for Freedom. In his preface to the Spanish version of the essay, Jacques Chonchol. Minister of Agriculture in Chile's Allende government. correctly draws attention to Freire's analysis of the relations between technology and modernization. As Chonchol puts it. Freire "shows how to avoid the traditionalism of the status quo without falling into technological messianism." And both conclude that "while all development is modernization, not all modernization is development." One glimpses here the dialectic at work in Chile between the language of development and the vocabulary of liberation. This cross-fertilization is explicit in Freire's discussion of "mechanistic modernization." For him modernization is a purely mechanical process, responsive to the catalytic action of technicians, or manipulators who keep the locus of decisions outside the society undergoing change. This approach prevents that society, in short. from becoming the subject of its own transformation. But true agricultural development, like genuine land reform, requires that new structures and practices emerge from the old ones, thanks to the creativity generated by critical exchanges between "advanced technology and the empirical techniques of the peasants." As used here the term "empirical" evokes not the realm of social-science verification, but rather the world of those who live in daily familiarity with the soil: the world of trial and error, common sense and common wisdom. Hence extension agents can "communicate" only by entering the cultural universe of peasants. This they can do only by becoming vulnerable and by ratifying the reciprocity which their role as genuine educators dictates. xi

10 INTRODUCTION Freire does not minimize the obstacles faced by educators in rural settings. Nevertheless, for him the central issue faced by all change agents is: how to get results with maximum efficiency without losing time. Do dialogue and communication necessarily lead to lost time and, thereby, to delayed gains in production, so vital for national development? It would be naive, he replies, not to strive for higher agricultural production. But such increases must find their basis in the real relationships which bind tillers of the land to nature and to their historical/ cultural space. Accordingly, time is lost or efficiency is sacrificed only when peasants are "reified" by empty verbalism or by technocratic activism, both of which are enemies of true praxis. Therefore, each moment spent in dialogue which prepares men and women to "emerge" from their state of "immersion" is time gained. Conversely, all is lost, in spite of glittering appearances, if natural objects or social structures are formally altered but human subjects are left powerless as before. The goal of land reform, as of all developmental change, is to transform people, not merely to change structures. Freire's concern for people is so central that it rules out any policy, program, or project which does not become truly theirs. The mark of a successful educator is not skill in persuasionwhich is but an insidious form of propaganda-but the ability to dialogue with educatees in a mode of reciprocity. And rural extension fails as communication because it violates the dialectic of reciprocity; indeed no change agent or technical expert has the right to impose personal options on others. Two final remarks apply to Freire's overall work. The first evokes his Utopian vision. Paulo Freire's Utopianism is no idealistic dream spun out of a mind ideologically enamored of dialogue or of critical consciousness. No, it grows out of his practical involvement with oppressed groups in a process of struggle. To theorize otherwise, for Freire, is to foster a particularly repulsive form of naive consciousness. Hence Freire cannot be taken seriously if he is judged only in terms of short-term results. The oppressed in every society have no difficulty recognizing his voice as their own, in their efforts to overcome their cultural silence. Those who are truly oppressed do not enjoy the freedom to fail, the luxury of experimenting. This is why they heed only serious ideas which they can put into practice. It is in this basic way that Freire's approach to education, communication, and technology is serious: it means nothing unless it is assumed and re-created by human communities in struggle. Necessarily, therefore, short-term results may prove disappointing because such xii

11 INTRODUCTION efforts view creative Utopianism as the only viable brand of realistic politics in a world characterized by the praxis of domination. The second comment touches on Freire's personal style as educator. Now that he has visited the United States on several occasions and addressed numerous audiences, one can no longer dissociate his written from his oral work. His own educational practice stands as proof that dialogue is possible, that educators can learn together with educatees. Freire stubbornly refuses to be cast in the role of a charismatic guru dispensing wisdom to willing disciples. Unless one can criticize him, one cannot exchange thoughts with him. He is ever prompt to "decree his own death as an educator" (to use his own words) whenever he meets an interlocutor who unmasks some residual naivete in his own thought. The quality of his human relationships, even with total strangers, is testimony to his theory that all people are important and merit active respect. In a word, Paulo Freire is one of those rare persons whose stature grows the closer one gets to him. Increased familiarity breeds, not contempt, but a desire to read him anew with a more attentive ear. To know him is to become convinced that liberating education and authentic communication are indeed possible. Denis Goulet xiii

12 EDUCATION AS THE PRACTICE OF FREEDOM Translated and Edited by Myra Bergman Ramos

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14 Society in Transition To be human is to engage in relationships with others and with the world. It is to experience that world as an objective reality, independent of oneself, capable of being known. Animals, submerged within reality, cannot relate to it; they are creatures of mere contacts. But man's separateness from and openness to the world distinguishes him as a being of relationships. Men, unlike animals, are not only in the world but with the world. Human relationships with the world are plural in nature. Whether facing widely different challenges of the environment or the same challenge, men are not limited to a single reaction pattern. They organize themselves, choose the best response, test themselves, act, and change in the very act of responding. They do all this consciously, as one uses a tool to deal with a problem. Men relate to their world in a critical way. They apprehend the objective data of their reality (as well as the ties that link one datum to another) through reflection-not by reflex, as do animals. And in the act of critical perception, men discover their own temporality. Transcending a single dimension, they reach back to yesterday, recognize today, and come upon tomorrow. The dimensionality of time is one of the fundamental discoveries in the history of human culture. In illiterate cultures, the "weight" of apparently limitless time hindered people from reaching that consciousness of temporality, and thereby achieving a sense of their historical nature. A cat has no historicity; his inability to emerge from time submerges him in a totally one-dimensional "today" of which he has no consciousness. Men exist' in time. They are inside. They are outside. They 3

15 EDUCATION FOR CRITICAL CONSCIOUSNESS inherit. They incorporate. They modify. Men are not imprisoned within a permanent "today"; they emerge, and become temporalized. As men emerge from time, discover temporality, and free themselves from "today," their relations with the world become impregnated with consequence. The normal role of human beings in and with the world is not a passive one. Because they are not limited to the natural (biological) sphere but participate in the creative dimension as well, men can intervene in reality in order to change it. Inheriting acquired experience, creating and re-creating, integrating themselves into their context, responding to its challenges, objectifying themselves, discerning, transcending, men enter into the domain which is theirs exclusively-that of History and of Culture.2 Integration with one's context, as distinguished from adaptation, is a distinctively human activity. Integration results from the capacity to adapt oneself to reality plus the critical capacity to make choices and to transform that reality. To the extent that man loses his ability to make choices and is subjected to the choices of others, to the extent that his decisions are no longer his own because they result from external prescriptions, he is no longer integrated. Rather, he has adapted. He has "adjusted." Unpliant men, with a revolutionary spirit, are often termed "maladjusted." The integrated person is person as Subject. In contrast, the adaptive person is person as object, adaptation representing at most a weak form of self-defense. If man is incapable of changing reality, he adjusts himself instead. Adaptation is behavior characteristic of the animal sphere; exhibited by man, it is symptomatic of his dehumanization. Throughout history men have attempted to overcome the factors which make them accommodate or adjust, in a struggle-constantly threatened by oppression-to attain their full humanity. As men relate to the world by responding to the challenges of the environment, they begin to dynamize, to master, and to humanize reality. They add to it something of their own making, by giving temporal meaning to geographic space, by creating culture. This interplay of men's relations with the world and with their fellows docs not (except in cases of repressive power) permit societal or cultural immobility. As men create, re-create, and decide, historical epochs begin to take shape.' And it is by creating, re-creating ilnd deciding that men should participate in these epochs. An historical epoch is characterized by a series of aspirations, concerns, 4

16 SOCIETY IN TRANSITION and values in search of fulfillment; by ways of being and behaving; by more or less generalized attitudes. The concrete representations of many of these aspirations, concerns, and values, as well as the obstacles to their fulfillment, constitute the themes of that epoch, which in turn indicate tasks to be carried out! The epochs are fulfilled to the degree that their themes are grasped and their tasks solved; and they are superseded when their themes and tasks no longer correspond to newly emerging concerns. Men play a crucial role in the fulfillment and in the superseding of the epochs. Whether or not men can perceive the epochal themes and above all, how they act upon the reality within which these themes are generated will largely determine their humanization or dehumanization, their affirmation as Subjects or their reduction as objects. For only as men grasp the themes can they intervene in reality instead of remaining mere onlookers. And only by developing a permanently critical attitude can men overcome a posture of adjustment in order to become integrated with the spirit of the time. To the extent that an epoch dynamically generates its own themes, men will have to make "more and more use of intellectual, and less and less of emotional and instinctive functions..."5 But unfortunately, what happens to a greater or lesser degree in the various "worlds" into which the world is divided is that the ordinary person is crushed, diminished, converted into a spectator, maneuvered by myths which powerful social forces have created. These myths turn against him; they destroy and annihilate him. Tragically frightened, men fear authentic relationships and even doubt the possibility of their existence. On the other hand, fearing solitude, they gather in groups lacking in any critical and loving ties which might transform them into a cooperating unit, into a true community. "Gregariousness is always the refuge of mediocrities," said Nikolai Nikolaievich Vedeniapin in Dr. Zhivago. It is also an imprisoning armor which prevents men from loving. Perhaps the greatest tragedy of modern man is his domination by the force of these myths and his manipulation by organized advertising, ideological or otherwise. Gradually, without even realizing the loss, he relinquishes his capacity for choice; he is expelled from the orbit of decisions. Ordinary men do not perceive the tasks of the time; the latter are interpreted by an "elite" and presented in the form of recipes, of prescriptions. And when men try to save themselves by following the prescriptions, they drown in leveling anonymity, without hope and without faith, domesticated and adjusted. 5

17 EDUCATION FOR CRITICAL CONSCIOUSNESS As Erich Fromm said in Escape from Freedom:6 [Man] has become free from the external bonds that would prevent him from doing and thinking as he sees fit. He would be free to act according to his own will. if he knew what he wanted. thought. and felt. But he does not know. He conforms to anonymous authorities and adopts a self which is not his. The more he does this. the more powerless he feels. the more is he forced to conform. In spite of a veneer of optimism and initiative. modern man is overcome by a profound feeling of powerlessness which makes him gaze toward approaching catastrophes as though he were paralyzed. If men are unable to perceive critically the themes of their time. and thus to intervene actively in reality, they are carried along in the wake of change. They see that the times are changing, but they are submerged in that change and so cannot discern its dramatic significance. And a society beginning to move from one epoch to another requires the development of an especially flexible. critical spirit. Lacking such a spirit, men cannot perceive the marked contradictions which occur in society as emerging values in search of affirmation and fulfillment clash with earlier values seeking self-preservation. The time of epochal transition constitutes an historical-cultural "tidal wave." Contradictions increase between the ways of being. understanding. behaving, and valuing which belong to yesterday and other ways of perceiving and valuing which announce the future. As the contradictions deepen, the "tidal wave" becomes stronger and its climate increasingly emotional. This shock between a yesterday which is losing relevance but still seeking to survive, and a tomorrow which is gaining substance, characterizes the phase of transition as a time of announcement and a time of decision. Only. however, to the degree that the choices result from a critical perception of the contradictions are they real and capable of being transformed in action. Choice is illusory to the degree it represents the expectations of others. While all transition involves change, not all change results in transition. Changes can occur within a single historical epoch that do not profoundly affect it in any way. There is a normal interplay of social readjustments resulting from the search for fulfillment of the themes. However, when these themes begin to lose their substance and significance and new themes emerge. it is a sign that society is beginning to move into a new epoch. The time of transition involves a rapid movement in search of new themes and new tasks. In such a phase man needs more than ever to 6

18 SOCIETY IN TRANSITION be integrated with his reality. If he lacks the capacity to perceive the "mystery" of the changes, he will be a mere pawn at their mercy. Brazil. in the 1950s and early 1960s, was precisely in this position of moving from one epoch to another. Which were the themes and the tasks which had lost and were losing their substance in Brazilian society? All those characteristic of a "closed society."7 For instance, Brazil's nonautonomous status had generated the theme of cultural alienation. Elite and masses alike lacked integration with Brazilian reality. The elite lived "superimposed" upon that reality; the people, submerged within it. To the elite fell the task of importing alien cultural models; to the people, the task of following, of being under, of being ruled by the elite, of having no task of their own. With the split in Brazilian society, the entire complex of themes and tasks assumed a new aspect. The particular meaning and emphasis given by a closed society to themes like democracy, popular participation, freedom, property, authority, and education were no longer adequate for a society in transition. (Similarly, the military coup of 1964 required a new perception of the themes and tasks characteristic of the transitional phase.) If Brazil was to move surely toward becoming a homogeneously open society, the correct perception of new aspirations and a new perception of old themes were essential. Should a distortion of this perception occur, however, a corresponding distortion in the transition would lead not to an open society but toward a "massified" society8 of adjusted and domesticated men. Thus, in that transitional phase, education became a highly important task. Its potential force would depend above all upon our capacity to participate in the dynamism of the transitional epoch. It would depend upon our distinguishing clearly which elements truly belonged to the transition and which were simply present in it. As the link between one epoch in exhaustion and another gaining substance, the transition had aspects of prolonging and conserving the old society at the same time that it extended forward into the new society. The new perceptions did not prevail easily or without sacrifice; the old themes had to exhaust their validity before they could give way to the new. Thus the dynamic of transition involved the confusion of flux and reflux, advances and retreats. And those who lacked the ability to perceive the mystery of the times responded to each retreat with tragic hopelessness and generalized fear. In the last analysis, retreats do not deter the transition. They do not constitute backward movement, although they can retard movement or 7

19 EDUCATION FOR CRITICAL CONSCIOUSNESS distort it. The new themes (or new perceptions of old themes) which are repressed during the retreats will persist in their advance until such time as the validity of the old themes is exhausted and the new ones reach fulfillment. At that point, society will once more find itself in its normal rhythm of changes, awaiting a new moment of transition. Thus the moment of transition belongs much more to "tomorrow," to the new time it announces, than it does to the old. The starting point for the Brazilian transition was that closed society to which I have already referred, one whose raw material export economy was determined by an external market, whose very center of economic decision was located abroad-a "reflex," "object" society, lacking a sense of nationhood. Backward. Illiterate. Anti-dialogical. Elitist. That society split apart with the rupture of the forces which had kept it in equilibrium. The economic changes which began in the last century with industrialization, and which increased in this century, were instrumental in this cleavage. Brazil was a society no longer totally closed but not yet truly open: a society in the process of opening. The urban centers had become predominantly open, while the rural areas remained predominantly closed. Meanwhile the society ran the risk (due to the continual possibility of retreats, viz., the present military regime) of a catastrophic return to closure. The democratic salvation of Brazil would lie in making our society homogeneously open. The challenge of achieving that openness was taken up by various contradictory forces, both external and internal. Some groups truly believed that the increasing political participation of the people during the transitional epoch would make it possible to achieve an open, autonomous society without violence. Other, reactionary, forces sought at all costs to obstruct any advance and to maintain the status quo indefinitely-or worse still, to bring about a retreat. While it would be impossible to return the emerging masses to their previous state of submersion, it might be possible to lead them to immobility and silence in the name of their own freedom. Men and institutions began to divide into two general categories-reactionaries and progressives; into those men and institutions which were in the process of transition and those which were not only in but of transition. The deepening of the clash between old and new encouraged a tendency to choose one side or the other; and the emotional climate of the time encouraged the tendency to become radical about that choice. Radicalization involves increased commitment to the position one has 8

20 SOCIETY IN TRANSITION chosen. It is predominantly critical, loving, humble, and communicative, and therefore a positive stance. The man who has made a radical option does not deny another man's right to choose, nor does he try to impose his own choice. He can discuss their respective positions. He is convinced he is right, but respects another man's prerogative to judge himself correct. He tries to convince and convert, not to crush his opponent. The radical does, however, have the duty, imposed by love itself, to react against the violence of those who try to silence him-of those who, in the name of freedom, kill his freedom and their own.9 To be radical does not imply self-flagellation. Radicals cannot passively accept a situation in which the excessive power of a few leads to the dehumanization of all. Unfortunately, the Brazilian people, elite and masses alike, were generally unprepared to evaluate the transition critically; and so, tossed about by the force of the contending contradictions, they began to fall into sectarian positions instead of opting for radical solutions. Sectarianism is predominantly emotional and uncritical. It is arrogant, antidialogical and thus anticommunicative. It is a reactionary stance, whether on the part of a rightist (whom I consider a "born" sectarian) or a leftist. The sectarian creates nothing because he cannot love. Disrespecting the choices of others, he tries to impose his own choice on everyone else. Herein lies the inclination of the sectarian to activism: action without the vigilance of reflection; herein his taste for sloganizing, which generally remains at the level of myth and half-truths and attributes absolute value to the purely relative.'" The radical, in contrast, rejects activism and submits his actions to reflection. The sectarian, whether rightist or leftist, sets himself up as the proprietor of history, as its sole creator, and the one entitled to set the pace of its movement. Rightist and leftist sectarians do differ in that one desires to stop the course of history, the other to anticipate it. On the other hand, they are similar in imposing their own convictions on the people, whom they thereby reduce to mere masses. For the sectarian, the people matter only as a support for his own goals. The sectarian wishes the people to be present at the historical process as activists, maneuvered by intoxicating propaganda. They are not supposed to think. Someone else will think for them; and it is as proteges, as children, that the sectarian sees them. Sectarians can never carry out a truly liberating revolution, because they are themselves unfree. The radical is a Subject to the degree that he perceives historical contradictions in increasingly critical fashion; however, he does not consider 9

21 EDUCATION FOR CRITICAL CONSCIOUSNESS himself the proprietor of history. And while he recognizes that it is impossible to stop or to anticipate history without penalty, he is no mere spectator of the historical process. On the contrary, he knows that as a Subject he can and ought, together with other Subjects, to participate creatively in that process by discerning transformations in order to aid and accelerate them. 11 In the Brazilian transition, it was the sectarians, especially those of the right, who predominated, rather than the radicals.12 And fanaticism flourished, fanned by the irrational climate arising as the contradictions in society deepened. This fanaticism, which separated and brutalized men, created hatred, thus threatening the essential promises of the transition-the humanization of the Brazilian people and their extraordinary sense of hope, hope rooted in the passage of Brazilian society from its previous colonial, reflex status to that of a Subject. In alienated societies, men oscillate between ingenuous optimism and hopelessness. Incapable of autonomous projects, they seek to transplant from other cultures solutions to their problems. But since these borrowed solutions are neither generated by a critical analysis of the context itself, nor adequately adapted to the context, 1' they prove inoperative and unfruitful. Finally the older generations give in to disheartenment and feelings of inferiority. But at some point in the historical process of these societies, new facts occur which provoke the first attempts at selfawareness, whereupon a new cultural climate begins to form. Some previously alienated intellectual groups begin to integrate themselves with their cultural reality. Entering the world, they perceive the old themes anew and grasp the tasks of their time. Bit by bit, these groups begin to see themselves and their society from their own perspective; they become aware of their own potentialities. This is the point at which hopelessness begins to be replaced by hope. Thus, nascent hope coincides with an increasingly critical perception of the concrete conditions of reality. Society now reveals itself as something unfinished, not as something inexorably given; it has become a challenge rather than a hopeless limitation. This new, critical optimism requires a strong sense of social responsibility and of engagement in the task of transforming society; it cannot mean simply letting things run on. But the climate of hope is adversely affected by the impact of sectarianism, which arises as the split in the closed society leads to the phenomenon Mannheim has called "fundamental democratization." This democratization, opening like a fan into interdependent dimensions 10

22 SOCIETY IN TRANSITION (economic, social. political. and cultural), characterized the unprecedented participating presence of the Brazilian people in the phase of transition. During the phase of the closed society, the people are submerged in reality. As that society breaks open, they emerge. No longer mere spectators, they uncross their arms, renounce expectancy, and demand intervention. No longer satisfied to watch, they want to participate. This participation disturbs the privileged elite, who band together in self-defense. At first, the elite react spontaneously. Later, perceiving more clearly the threat involved in the awakening of popular consciousness, they organize. They bring forth a group of " crisis theoreticians" (the new cultural climate is usually labelled a crisis); they create social assistance institutions and armies of social workers; and-in the name of a supposedly threatened freedom-they repel the participation of the people. The elite defend a sui generis democracy, in which the people are "unwell" and require "medicine"-whereas in fact their "ailment" is the wish to speak up and participate. Each time the people try to express themselves freely and to act. it is a sign they continue to be ill and thus need more medicine. In this strange interpretation of democracy, health is synonymous with popular silence and inaction. The defenders of this "democracy" speak often of the need to protect the people from what they call "foreign ideologies" -i.e., anything that could contribute to the active presence of the people in their own historical process. Similarly, they label as "subversives" all those who enter into the dynamics of the transition and become its representatives. "These people are subversive" (we are told) "because they threaten order." Actually, the elite have no alternative. As the dominant social class, they must preserve at all costs the social "order" in which they are dominant. They cannot permit any basic changes which would affect their control over decision-making. So from their point of view, every effort to supersede such an order means to subvert it criminally. During the Brazilian transition, as the popular classes renounced a position of accommodation and claimed their right to participate actively in the historical process, reactionary groups saw clearly the resulting threat to their interests. To end this uncomfortable quandary, they needed-in addition to the power they already possessed-the government. which at least in part they did not possess. Eventually, a coup d'etat was to solve that problem. In such an historical-cultural climate, it is virtually impossible for intensely emotional forces not to be unleashed. This irrational climate 11

23 EDUCATION FOR CRITICAL CONSCIOUSNESS bred and nourished sectarian positions on the part of those who wished to stop history in order to maintain their own privileges, and of those who hoped to anticipate history in order to "end" privileges. Both positions contributed to the massification and the relegation of the Brazilian people, who had only just begun to become a true "people." Misunderstood and caught in the middle (though they were not centrists) were the radicals, who wanted solutions to be found with the people, not fo r them or superimposed upon them. Radicals rejected the palliatives of "assistencialism,"14 the force of decrees, and the irrational fanaticism of "crusades," instead defending basic transformations in society which would treat men as persons and thus as Subjects. Internal reactionary forces centered around latifundiary15 interests were joined and given support by external forces that wished to prevent Brazil's transformation from an object to a Subject society. These external forces attempted their own pressures and their own assistencial solutions. Assistencialism is an especially pernicious method of trying to vitiate popular participation in the historical process. In the first place, it contradicts man's natural vocation as Subject in that it treats the recipient as a passive object, incapable of participating in the process of his own recuperation; in the second place, it contradicts the process of "fundamental democratization." The greatest danger of assistencialism is the violence of its anti-dialogue, which by imposing silence and passivity denies men conditions likely to develop or to "open" their consciousness. For without an increasingly critical consciousness men are not able to integrate themselves into a transitional society, marked by intense change and contradictions. Assistencialism is thus both an effect and a cause of massification. The important thing is to help men (and nations) help themselves, 1 6 to place them in consciously critical confrontation with their problems, to make them the agents of their own recuperation. In contrast, assistencialism robs men of a fundamental human necessityresponsibility, of which Simone Wei! says: For this need to be satisfied it is necessary that a man should often have to take decisions in matters great or small affecting interests that are distinct from his own, but in regard to which he feels a personal concern. 17 Responsibility cannot be acquired intellectually, but only through experience. Assistencialism offers no responsibility, no opportunity to 12

24 SOCIETY IN TRANSITION make decisions, but only gestures and attitudes which encourage passivity. Whether the assistance is of foreign or national origin, this method cannot lead a country to a democratic destination. Brazil in transition needed urgently to find rapid and sure solutions to its distressing problems-but solutions with the people and never for them or imposed upon them. What was needed was to go to the people and help them to enter the his to rica I process critically. The prerequisite for this task was a form of education enabling the people to reflect on themselves, their responsibilities, and their role in the new cultural climate-indeed to reflect on their very power of reflection. The resulting development of this power would mean an increased capacity for choice. Such an education would take into the most serious account the various levels at which the Brazilian people perceived their reality, as being of the greatest importance for the process of their humanization. Therein lay my own concern to analyze these historically and culturally conditioned levels of understanding. Men submerged in the historical process are characterized by a state I have described as "semi-intransitivity of consciousness." 18 It is the consciousness of men belonging to what Fernando de Azevedo has called "circumscribed" and "introverted" communities, 19 the consciousness which prevailed in the closed Brazilian society and which predominates even today in the most backward regions of Brazil. Men of semiintransitive consciousness cannot apprehend problems situated outside their sphere of biological necessity. Their interests center almost totally around survival. and they lack a sense of life on a more historic plane. The concept of semi-intransitivity does not signify the closure of a person within himself. crushed by an all-powerful time and space. Whatever his state, man is an open being. Rather, semi-intransitive consciousness means that his sphere of perception is limited, that he is impermeable to challenges situated outside the sphere of biological necessity. In this sense only, semi-intransitivity represents a near disengagement between men and their existence. In this state, discernment is difficult. Men confuse their perceptions of the objects and challenges of the environment, and fall prey to magical explanations because they cannot apprehend true causality. As men amplify their power to perceive and respond to suggestions and questions arising in their context. and increase their capacity to enter into dialogue not only with other men but with their world, they become "transitive." Their interests and concerns now extend beyond the simple 13

25 EDUCATION FOR CRITICAL CONSCIOUSNESS vital sphere. Transitivity of consciousness makes man "permeable." It leads him to replace his disengagement from existence with almost total engagement. Existence is a dynamic concept, implying eternal dialogue between man and man, between man and the world, between man and his Creator. It is this dialogue which makes of man an historical being. There is, however, an initial, predominantly naive, stage of transitive consciousness. Naive transitivity, the state of consciousness which predominated in Brazilian urban centers during the transitional period, is characterized by an over-simplification of problems; by a nostalgia for the past; by underestimation of the common man; by a strong tendency to gregariousness; by a lack of interest in investigation, accompanied by an accentuated taste for fanciful explanations; by fragility of argument; by a strongly emotional style; by the practice of polemics rather than dialogue; by magical explanations. (The magical aspect typical of intransitivity is partially present here also. Although men's horizons have expanded and they respond more openly to stimuli, these responses still have a magical quality.) Naive transitivity is the consciousness of men who are still almost part of a mass, in whom the developing capacity for dialogue is still fragile and capable of distortion. If this consciousness does not progress to the stage of critical transitivity, it may be deflected by sectarian irrationality into fanaticism. The critically transitive consciousness is characterized by depth in the interpretation of problems; by the substitution of causal principles for magical explanations; by the testing of one's "findings" and by openness to revision; by the attempt to avoid distortion when perceiving problems and to avoid preconceived notions when analyzing them; by refusing to transfer responsibility; by rejecting passive positions; by soundness of argumentation; by the practice of dialogue rather than polemics; by receptivity to the new for reasons beyond mere novelty and by the good sense not to reject the old just because it is old-by accepting what is valid in both old and new. Critical transitivity is characteristic of authentically democratic regimes and corresponds to highly permeable, interrogative, restless and dialogical forms of life-in contrast to silence and inaction, in contrast to the rigid, militarily authoritarian state presently prevailing in Brazil, an historical retreat which the usurpers of power try to present as a reencounter with democracy. There are certain positions, attitudes, and gestures associated with the awakening of critical awareness, which occur naturally due to economic progress. These should not be confused with an authentically critical 14

26 SOCIETY IN TRANSITION position, which a person must make his own by intervention in and integration with his own context. Conscientizaqao represents the development of the awakening of critical awareness. It will not appear as a natural byproduct of even major economic changes, but must grow out of a critical educational effort based on favorable historical conditions. In Brazil, the passage from a predominantly intransitive consciousness to a predominantly na"ive transitivity paralleled the transformation of economic patterns. As the process of urbanization intensified, men were thrust into more complex forms of life. As men entered a larger sphere of relationships and received a greater number of suggestions and challenges to their circumstances, their consciousness automatically became more transitive. However, the further, crucial step from na"ive transitivity to critical transitivity would not occur automatically. Achieving this step would thus require an active, dialogical educational program concerned with social and political responsibility, and prepared to avoid the danger of massification. There is a close potential relationship between na"ive transitivity and massification. If a person does not move from nai"ve transitivity to a critical consciousness but instead falls into a fa naticized consciousness/0 he will become even more disengaged from reality than in the semi-intransitive state. To the extent that a person acts more on the basis of emotionality than of reason, 21 his behavior occurs adaptively and cannot result in commitment, for committed behavior has its roots in critical consciousness and capacity for genuine choice. The adaptation and lack of engagement typical of semi-intransitivity are thus more prevalent still in a state of massification. The power to perceive authentic causality is obliterated in the semi-intransitive state; hence the latter's magical quality. In massification this power is distorted, producing a mythical quality. In the semi-intransitive state, men are predominantly illogical; in fanaticized consciousness the distortion of reason makes men irrational. The possibility of dialogue diminishes markedly. Men are defeated and dominated, though they do not know it; they fear freedom, though they believe themselves to be free. They follow general formulas and prescriptions as if by their own choice. They are directed; they do not direct themselves. Their creative power is impaired. They are objects, not Subjects. For men to overcome their state of massification, they must be enabled to reflect about that very condition. But since authentic reflection cannot exist apart from action, men must also act to transform the concrete reality which has determined their massification. 15

27 EDUCATION FOR CRITICAL CONSCIOUSNESS In short, naive transitive consciousness can evolve toward critical transitivity, characteristic of a legitimately democratic mentality, or it can be deflected toward the debased, clearly dehumanized, fanaticized consciousness characteristic of massification. During the Brazilian transition, as the emotional climate became more intense and sectarian irrationality (especially of the right) grew stronger, there was increasing resistance to an educational program capable of helping the people move from ingenuity to criticism. Indeed, if the people were to become critical. enter reality, increase their capacity to make choices (and therefore their capacity to reject the prescriptions of others), the threat to privilege would increase as well. To irrational sectarians, the humanization of the Brazilian people loomed as the specter of their own dehumanization, and any effort toward this end as subversive action. But such an effort was imperative, for those who believed that the destiny of men is to become authentic human beings. Notes In the English language, the terms "live" and "exist" have assumed implications opposite to their etymological origins. As used here, to exist is more than to live, because it is more than being in the world; it is to be with the world as well. And this capacity for communication between the being which exists and the objective world gives to "existing" a quality of critical capacity not present in mere "living." Transcending, discerning, entering into dialogue (communicating and participating) are exclusively attributes of existence. One can only exist in relation to others who also exist. and in communication with them. In this regard, see Karl Jaspers, The Origin and Goal of History (New Haven, 1953 ), and Reason and Anti-reason in our Time (New Haven, 1952). 2 See Erich Kahler, Historia Universal del Hombre. 3 See Hans Freyer, Teoria de Ia epoca atual (Mexico). 4 See Paulo Freire, Pedagogy of the Oppressed (New York, 1970), pp (Translator's note.) 5 Zevedei Barbu, Democracy and Dictatorship, Their Psychology and Patterns of Life (New York, 1956), p (New York,!960), pp See Karl Popper, The Open Society and Its Enemies (Princeton, 1966). 8 A "massified" society is one in which the people, after entering the historical process, have been manipulated by the elite into an unthinking, manageable agglomeration. This process is termed "massification." It stands in contrast to 16

28 SOCIETY IN TRANSITION conscientiza(iio, which is the process of achieving a critical consciousness. (Translator's note.) 9 Every relationship of domination, of exploitation, of oppression, is by definition violent, whether or not the violence is expressed by drastic means. In such a relationship, dominator and dominated alike are reduced to things-the former dehumanized by an excess of power, the latter by lack of it. And things cannot love. When the oppressed legitimately rise up against their oppressor, however, it is they who are usually labelled "violent." "barbaric," "inhuman," and "cold." (Among the innumerable rights claimed by the dominating consciousness is the right to define violence, and to locate it. Oppressors never see themselves as violent.) 10 See Tristao de Ataide, 0 Existencialismo e Outros Mitos do Nosso Tempo (Rio de Janeiro, 1956). 11 For a further discussion of radicalization and sectarianism, see Pedagogy of the Oppressed, pp (Translator's note.) 12 At that time, radical positions in the sense I have described them were being taken principally, although not exclusively, by groups of Christians who believed with Mounier that "History," both the history of the world and the history of human beings, has meaning. (This is the first of Mounier's four fundamental ideas regarding the idea of progress as a modern theme. The second is that progress proceeds continuously, although diverse vicissitudes may complicate its course, and that its movement is the movement of man's liberation. The third idea is that the development of science and technique which characterizes the modern Western age and is spreading over the entire world constitutes a decisive aspect of this liberation. The last is that in this ascent man is charged with being the author of his own liberation. See Emanuel Mounier, "Le christianisme et Ia notion de Progres," La Petite Peur du xxe Siec/e [Paris, 1948] pp Irrational sectarians, including some Christians, either did not understand or did not want to understand the radicals' search for integration with Brazilian problems. They did not understand the radicals' concern with progress, leading toward human liberation. And so they accused these radicals of attempting to dehumanize the Brazilian people. 13 See Alberto Guerreiro Ramos, A Redu(iiO Socio/6gica (Rio de Janeiro, 1958). 14 Assistencialism: a term used in Latin America to describe policies of financial or social assistance which attack symptoms, but not causes, of social ills. 15 Latifundium: a noun of Latin origin which, in Spanish and Portuguese, means a large privately owned landholding. (Translator's note.) 16 Speaking of the relations between rich and poor nations, developed and developing nations, Pope John XXIII urged the rich not to aid the poor by means of what he termed "disguised forms of colonial domination." Rather, he said, aid should be given without self-interest, with the sole intention of making it possible for nations to develop themselves economically and 17

29 EDUCATION FOR CRITICAL CONSCIOUSNESS socially. Assistencialism cannot do this, for it is precisely one of those forms of colonial domination. See "Christianity and Social Progress," from the Encyclical Letter Mater et Magistra, articles 171 and The Need fo r Roots (New York, 1952), p This theme is treated in greater detail in my Cultural Action fo r Freedom, Monograph Series No. 7, 1970, Harvard Educational Review. Center for the Study of Development and Social Change. 19 Educa ao entre Dois Mundos (Sao Paulo), p See Gabriel MarceL Man Against Mass Society (Chicago, 1962). 21 Barbu sees reason as "the individual capacity to grasp the order in change, and the unity in variety." Op cit., p

30 Closed Society and Democratic Inexperience To understand the Brazilian transition, its advances and retreats, and its significance as the "announcement" of a new epoch, one must look at the closed, colonial, slavocratic, reflex, anti-democratic society which served as its starting point. One of the strongest characteristics of that society, always present and ready to flower in the ebbs and flows of the historical process, was our lack of democratic experience. This lack has been and continues to be one of the major obstacles to our democratization-not an insurmountable barrier, but neither one to be underestimated. To cite an apparently obvious but absolutely fundamental warning: "Mind in all its manifestations is never only what it is, but also what it was... " 1 Most analysts of Brazilian history and culture have noted the absence of the preconditions for the development of participatory behavior by which we might have constructed our society "with our own hands." Experience in self-government might have afforded us an exercise in democracy; but the conditions of our colonization did not favor this possibility. In fact, Brazil developed under conditions which were hostile to the acquisition of democratic experience, with head bowed, in fear of the Crown, without a press, foreign relations, schools, or a voice of her own. Our colonization, strongly predatory, was based on economic exploitation of the large landholding and on slave labor-at first native, then African. A colonization of this type could not create conditions necessary for the development of the permeable, flexible mentality characteristic of a democratic cultural climate. Referring to the lack of political experience of the lower classes in Brazil, Caio Prado has affirmed that the "national economy, and our social 19

31 EDUCATION FOR CRITICAL CONSCIOUSNESS organization as welt built as they were upon a base of slavery, could not admit of a democratic and popular political structure.''2 At the outset, the colonization of Brazil was above all a commercial enterprise. Portugal had no intention of creating a civilization in her new lands; she was interested only in a profitable business venture. And so for years Brazil, who could offer nothing compared to the magnificence of the Eastern territories, was disdained by Portugal and left to the gluttonous incursions of adventurers. On the other hand, during the period of the Brazilian conquest, Portugal had insufficient population to engage in projects of settlement. Unfortunately for our development, the first colonizers of Brazil lacked a sense of integration with the colony. They wished only to exploit it, not to cultivate it; to be "over" it, not to stay in it and with it.' Later, contingencies arose which required actual settlement rather than mere trading posts, resulting in a greater integration of the colonizers with the land. Even then, those who came to the tropics tended to be men possessing sufficient means to establish a lucrative business; only against their will did men come as workers. In addition (and possibly in part due to the above tendency), our colonization developed on the basis of large landholding-namely the plantation (ja zenda) and the sugar mill (engenho). Immense tracts of land were granted to a single person, who took possession as well of the men who came to live and work there. On these widely separated holdings, the inhabitants had no alternative but to become proteges of their all-powerful masters. They needed protection against the predatory incursions of the natives, the arrogant violence of the tropics, the raids of other senhores. These conditions bred the habits of domination and dependence which still prevail among us in the form of paternalistic approaches to problems. The enormous size of the estates, the small population of the mother country which hindered attempts at settlement, the commercial spirit of the colonization, all led to the institution of slavery. That fact created a series of obstacles to the formation of a democratic mentality, of a permeable consciousness. Antoni! has given us a vivid picture of the masterslave mentality which did prevail on the fa zenda: Anyone who gains the title of senhor seems to want everyone else to behave as servants... In Brazil people say that the slave needs three "P's": pau, piio e pano (cudgel, bread and cloth). The phrase begins badly, with punishment, but would God that eating and clothing were as abundant as the punishment which so often is given for the slightest offense. 4 20

32 CLOSED SOCIETY AND DEMOCRATIC INEXPERIENCE The large estates, with highly self-sufficient economies, functioned as closed systems with a climate favoring despotism, decrees, and the "law" of the master. In truth, there are laws which impose certain limits to the will and the ire of the masters, such as that which fixes the number of whiplashes it is permitted to inflict at one time to a slave without the intervention of the authorities; however, as I have said before, these laws are without force and perhaps are even unknown to the majority of the slaves and masters. On the other hand, the authorities are located so far distant that in reality, the punishment of a slave lor a real or imaginary fault and the bad treatment resulting from the caprice and the cruelty of the master are limited only by the fear of losing the slave through death or through flight, or by respect for public opinion.' The excess of power which has characterized our culture from the start created on the one hand an almost masochistic desire to submit to that power and on the other a desire to be all-powerful.6 This habit of submission led men to adapt and adjust to their circumstances, instead of seeking to integrate themselves with reality. Integration, the behavior characteristic of flexibly democratic regimes, requires a maximum capacity for critical thought. In contrast, the adapted man, neither dialoguing nor participating, accommodates to conditions imposed upon him and thereby acquires an authoritarian and acritical frame of mind. The social distance characteristic of human relationships on the great estate did not permit dialogue. Even the more humane relationships between masters and slaves which prevailed on some estates produced not dialogue but paternalism, the patronizing attitude of an adult towards a child. The proper climate for dialogue is found in open areas, where men can develop a sense of participation in a common life. Dialogue requires social and political responsibility; it requires at least a minimum of transitive consciousness, which cannot develop under the closed conditions of the large estate. Herein lie the roots of Brazilian "mutism"; societies which are denied dialogue in favor of decrees become predominantly "silent."7 (It should be noted that silence does not signify an absence of response, but rather a response which lacks a critical quality.) Without dialogue, self-government cannot exist; hence, selfgovernment was almost unknown among us. There was nothing in Brazil 21

33 EDUCATION FOR CRITICAL CONSCIOUSNESS to compare to the European agrarian communities studied by Joaquim Costa, who affirmed: "Since its origins, all of European humanity has evolved under a regime of political experience."8 In contrast, the center of gravity in Brazilian private and public life was located in external power and authority. Men were crushed by the power of the landlords, the governors, the captains, the viceroys. Introjecting this external authority, the people developed a consciousness which "housed" oppression,9 rather than the free and creative consciousness indispensable to authentically democratic regimes. Brazil never experienced that sense of community, of participation in the solution of common problems, which is instilled in the popular consciousness and transformed into a knowledge of democracy. On the contrary, the circumstances of our colonization and settlement created in us an extremely individualistic outlook. As Vieira said so well, "Each family is a republic."10 Even the political solidarity of men to their landholding masters, later necessitated by the importation of political democracy, was more apparent than real. Urban centers created and governed by the people might have afforded us an apprenticeship in democracy. But the economic organization of the country on the basis of the dispersed, self-contained landholdings did not permit the development of cities with a middle class possessing a reasonable economic base.11 In Brazil, urban centers rarely arose out of political solidarity, out of the need to associate human groups into communities. The history of our political institutions reveals instead the pattern of creating urban nuclei by decree and of "drafting" their inhabitants. It was impossible for democratically urban life to flourish in the poverty-stricken cities, which were absorbed and suffocated by the overwhelming economic power of the great estates. In addition, during the Colonial period Portugal maintained Brazil in almost total isolation. Drastic restrictions were imposed not only on foreign relations, but even on relations among Brazilian provinces themselves. Such relations, if permitted, would have provided an indispensable exchange of experiences by which human groups, through mutual observation, correct and improve themselves. Instead, the isolated colony was forced to satisfy the increasingly gluttonous demands of the mother country. The point is not whether the colonial policy could have been open, permeable, and democratic; it is that the excessively tutelary nature of that policy did not permit us any democratic experience.12 As Berlink has noted, 22

34 CLOSED SOCIETY AND DEMOCRATIC INEXPERIENCE In Brazil democratic aspirations have been almost nonexistent. Such was the submission in which the Portuguese Metropolis raised us, such was the aping of colonial methods by those who governed after Independence, that even today such aspirations are only incipient.'' It might be said that our Colonial municipal councils and senates afforded some opportunity for democratic experience. But the people did not participate in these assemblies. A privileged class governed the municipalities: the so-called "gentlemen" whose names were inscribed in the books of the nobility. These men were the representatives of the sugar aristocracy, the powerful landowners, the highborn, as well as the nouveau riche of the epoch, who had prospered in commerce and been promoted to the nobility. Common men were excluded from the elective process, and forbidden to enter into the destiny of their communities. So without civic rights, the people were set aside, irremediably removed from any experience of self-government or dialogue. Indeed, on occasion the people were capable of mutiny, which is the "voice" of those who have been silent in the creation and development of their communities. But for the most part they were marked by submission. The people adapted to a rigidly authoritarian structure of life, which formed and strengthened an anti-democratic mentality. Until special circumstances14 were to alter the pace of that life. In 1808 Dom Joao VI of Portugal arrived in Rio de Janeiro, where he installed himself with all his Court. The presence among us of the royal family, and especially the transfer of the Portuguese government to Rio de Janeiro, inevitably provoked profound changes in Brazilian life. On the one hand, these changes afforded-at least to free men-new possibilities for experiences in democracy. (Paradoxically, as we shall see, these changes were also to reinforce our previous, anti-democratic traditions.) A series of reforms following upon the arrival of the Portuguese court encouraged urban industry and activity and established schools, press, libraries, and technical education. The cities grew in power, as the rural nobility declined. In the words of Gilberto Freyre, With the arrival of Dom.Joao VI... the rural patriarchy, firmly established in its plantations and ranch houses-the plump ladies in the kitchen making sweets, the men puffed up with their titles and privileges of sergeant-major or captain-major, their silver goblets, spurs, and daggers, their many legitimate 23

35 EDUCATION FOR CRITICAL CONSCIOUSNESS children and by-blows scattered about the house and the slave quartersbegan to lose its grandeur of colonial days. A grandeur which the discovery of the gold mines was already undermining. 15 This transfer of power to the cities, which began to assume a newly active position in the national life, did not as yet signify participation by the common man in the life of his community.16 The strength of the cities lay in the opulent bourgeoisie which had prospered in commerce. Later, that strength would lie also in the ideas of the University graduates-of rural origin, but true urbanites-who had studied in Europe. These ideas were discussed in our "illiterate" provinces as if they were European centers. But accompanying this surge of reforms and changes, and in opposition to the tenuous possibilities of democratization which might have arisen with city life, Brazil was subjected to Europeanization (or re Europeanization), together with a series of anti-democratic procedures which reinforced our lack of democratic experience. Parallel with the process of Europeanization or re-europeanization of Brazil, there came an intensification of the old system of oppression not only of slaves and servants by the masters, of the poor by the rich, but of Africans and natives by those who considered themselves the surrogates of European culture, that is to say, the leading city residents.... The right to gallop or canter through the streets of the cities was the prerogative of officers and militiamen, the prerogative of men dressed and shod in European style... it was forbidden in the city of Recife, as of December 10, 1831, "to shout, scream, or cry out in the streets," a restriction directed against the Africans and their outbursts of a religious or festive nature. 17 And it was upon this vast lack of democratic experience, characterized by a feudal mentality and sustained by a colonial economic and social structure, that we attempted to inaugurate a formal democracy. Acting in accord with our state of cultural alienation, we turned to societies we considered superior to ours in search of a prefabricated solution for our own problems. And so we imported the structure of the national democratic state without first considering our own context, unaware that the inauthenticity of superimposed solutions dooms them to failure. Not only did we lack experience in self-government when we imported the democratic state; more importantly, we were not yet able to offer the people either the circumstances or the climate for their first experiments in democracy. Upon a feudal economic structure and a social structure 24

36 CLOSED SOCIETY AND DEMOCRATIC INEXPERIENCE within which men were defeated, crushed and silenced, we superimposed a social and political form which required dialogue, participation, political and social responsibility, as well as a degree of social and political solidarity which we had not yet attained. (We had reached only the level of private solidarity, demonstrated by such manifestations as the mutiriio.) 18 And which of our historical conditions might have produced a genuinely popular, permeable, and critical consciousness upon which Brazil could authentically have founded a democratic state? Our feudal economic structure? The total power of the landholding masters? Our exaggerated habit of submission and obedience? The absence of dialogue? The force of the various governors and officials? The lack of attention to popular education? The artificially created urban centers? The selfsufficiency of the great estate, which suffocated urban life? The prejudice against manual or mechanical labor which we inherited from slavery? Our external and internal isolation as a colony? The innumerable prohibitions against any industrial production that might affect the interests of the mother country? The Colonial municipal councils, in which common men could not participate? The growing strength of the bourgeoisie who assumed the power of the decadent rural aristocracy? Obviously these conditions did not constitute the cultural climate necessary for the rise of democratic regimes. Before it becomes a political form, democracy is a form of life, characterized above all by a strong component of transitive consciousness. Such transitivity can neither appear nor develop except as men are launched into debate, participating in the examination of common problems. Of de To cqueville's affirmation that a democratic reform, or democratic action in general, has to "be brought about not only with the assent of the people, but by their hand," Barbu comments: In order to make their society "by their hand" the members of a group have to possess considerable experience in, and knowledge of, public administration. They need also certain institutions which allow them to take a share in the making of their society. But they need something more than this; they need a specific frame of mind, that is, certain experiences, attitudes, prejudices and beliefs shared by them all, or by a large majority.19 Until the split in Brazilian society offered the first conditions for popular participation, precisely the opposite situation prevailed: popular alienation, silence, and inaction. With few exceptions, the people remained at 25

37 EDUCATION FOR CRITICAL CONSCIOUSNESS the margin of historical events or were led to those events demagogically.20 Then, finally, major economic changes began to affect the system of forces which had maintained the closed society in equilibrium; with the end of that equilibrium, society split open and entered the phase of transition. The first of these changes occurred toward the end of the last century. Following restrictions on the slave trade in 1850 and the abolition of slavery in 1888, capital intended for the purchase of slaves suddenly found itself without application. Little by little, this capital was employed in incipient industrial activities. Suppression of the slave trade thus led to our first attempts at internal economic growth. Further, the government policy of encouraging immigration to replace slave labor greatly stimulated our development. At no period of the nineteenth century after Independence were there prepared and produced so many important events for the life of the nation as in the last quarter of that century... meanwhile, the beginning of the industrial upsurge in 1885, the vigorous civilizing movement that we owe to immigration; the suppression of the slave regime which, even when carried on rapidly, as in the United States, coincided with a great increase in production, and the new economy of free labor, contributed to the transformation of the social and economic structure, which could not be without effect upon habits and mentalities, especially in the urban population.21 It was in this century, however, beginning in the 1920s and increasing after the Second World War, that Brazilian industrialization received its strongest impulse. At the same time, the more urbanized areas of the country grew rapidly. (It should be noted that urban growth is not always synonomous with industrial development; a Brazilian sociologist once commented that the rise of certain cities revealed more "swelling" than development.) The above changes did indeed affect our entire national life. Culture, the arts, literature, and science showed new tendencies toward research, identification with Brazilian reality, and the planning of solutions rather than their importation. (The Superintendency of Development of the Northeast [SUDENE]. directed by the economist Celso Furtado before the military coup, was an example of such planning.) The country had begun to find itself. The people emerged and began to participate in the historical process. 26

38 CLOSED SOCIETY AND DEMOCRATIC INEXPERIENCE Notes I Barbu, op. cit., p Evolu ao Politica do Brasil e Outros Estudos (Sao Paulo, 1953), p See the excellent study by Clodomir V. Moog, Bandeirantes and Pioneers (New York, 1964) in which he compares Brazilian and North American cultural development. 4 Andre Joao Antoni!, Engenho Real, p Johann Moritz Rugendas, Viagem Pitoresca Atraves do Brasil (Sao Paulo, 1940), p See Gilberta Freyre, The Masters and the Slaves (New York, 1964). 7 I have returned to this point in more recent studies, with a preliminary analysis of what I call "the culture of silence." See particularly Cultural Action fo r Freedom. 8 "Coletivismo Agrario en Espana," cited by Francisco Jose de Oliveira Viana, Instituil;oes Politicas Brasileiras (Rio de Janeiro, 1949), Vol. IV, Ch. IV. 9 For further development of this theme, see Pedagogy of the Oppressed, Chapter I (Translator's note). I 0 As cited in Viana, op. cit., Vol. I, p. I 51. II "During this time [the 16th to the 19th century] Brazil was a society that lacked almost all forms or expressions of individual or family status except the two extremes: master and slave. The rise, to any considerable degree, of the middle class, the small independent farmer, the tradesman, is so recent among us that during that entire period it can practically be ignored." Gilberta Freyre, The Mansion and the Shanties (New York, 1963 ), p. xvi. 12 Portuguese policy toward Brazil did contain some positive aspects, such as miscegenation, which predisposed us toward a type of "ethnic democracy." 13 Berlink, Fatores Adversos na Formar;iio Brasileira. 14 In 1807 France invaded Portugal. The Portuguese royal family fled to Brazil and established Rio de Janeiro as the capital of Portugal (Translator's note). 15 Freyre, The Mansion and the Shanties, p The truly tremendous changes I have described did not yet affect the survival of slavery. That institution still impeded the new surges of development which a free labor system would later stimulate by promoting the people from a state of submission to that of at least incipient participation. Only with the split in Brazilian society and its entry into the phase of transition can one speak of a truly popular impetus. 17 Freyre, The Mansions and the Shanties, p. 263, pp Mutiriio: a type of "work party" among friends to get a large job done quickly (Translator's note). 19 Barbu, op. cit., p

39 EDUCATION FOR CRITICAL CONSCIOUSNESS 20 The Brazilian people watched the proclamation of the Republic "in bewilderment" (Aristides Lobo), and in bewilderment they have observed the most recent retreats in their historical process. (They are less bewildered, perhaps, with regard to the military coup of 1964, as the people begin to understand that historical retreats occur precisely because of their own advances. They begin to understand that it was their own growing participation in Brazilian political events, threatening the privileges of the elite, which frightened that elite into such drastic action.) 21 Fernando de Azevedo, Brazilian Culture (New York, 1950), pp

40 Education versus Massification From the start of the Brazilian transition, it became essential to achieve economic development as a support for democracy, thereby ending the oppressive power of the rich over the very poor. This development would necessarily be autonomous and national in character. It could not limit itself to technical questions or "pure" economic policy or structural reform, but would also have to involve the passage from one mentality to another: the support of basic reforms as a foundation for development, and development as a foundation for democracy itself. The special contribution of the educator to the birth of the new society would have to be a critical education which could help to form critical attitudes, for the nai"ve consciousness with which the people had emerged into the historical process left them an easy prey to irrationality. Only an education facilitating the passage from na"ive to critical transitivity, increasing men's ability to perceive the challenges of their time, could prepare the people to resist the emotional power of the transition. For as the people emerge into a state of awareness, they discover that the elite regard them with contempt; 1 in reaction, they tend whenever possible to respond aggressively. The elite, in turn, frightened at the threat to the legitimacy of their power, attempt by force or by paternalism to silence and domesticate the masses; they try to impede the process of popular emergence. These circumstances exacerbate the prevailing irrational climate, stimulating sectarian positions of various casts. And in large part the people, emerging but disorganized, illiterate and semiliterate, na"ive and unprepared, become pawns of that irrationality. The middle class, fearing proletarization and always seeking privileges and 29

41 EDUCATION FOR CRITICAL CONSCIOUSNESS upward mobility, view this popular emergence as, at the very least, a threat to their own "peace" and react with predictable mistrust. The more the Brazilian transition moved toward irrational positions, the more urgently we needed to create an educational process encouraging critical attitudes. A society like ours, undergoing profound, often abrupt, changes that stimulated popular participation in the national life required a reform not only of pedagogical institutions but of the organization and educational aspects of other institutions as well, in order to effect a total approach to social and political responsibility and decision. Karl Mannheim has said:... In a society in which the main changes are to be brought about through collective deliberation, and in which re-evaluations should be based upon intellectual insight and consent, a completely new system of education would be necessary, one which would focus its main energies on the development of our intellectual powers and bring about a frame of mind which can bear the burden of scepticism and which docs not panic when many of the thought habits are doomed to vanish.' Although Brazil had not yet entered a phase in which "the main changes [were] made by collective deliberation," it was moving in that directionif the phenomenon of popular participation did not regress by becoming more emotional than critical. The education our situation demanded would enable men to discuss courageously the problems of their context-and to intervene in that context; it would warn men of the dangers of the time and offer them the confidence and the strength to confront those dangers instead of surrendering their sense of self through submission to the decisions of others. By predisposing men to reevaluate constantly, to analyze "findings," to adopt scientific methods and processes, and to perceive themselves in dialectical relationship with their social reality, that education could help men to assume an increasingly critical attitude toward the world and so to transform it. Certainly we could not rely on the mere process of technological modernization to lead us from a naive to a critical consciousness. Indeed, an analysis of highly technological societies usually reveals the "domestication" of man's critical faculties by a situation in which he is massified and has only the illusion of choice.' Excluded from the sphere of decisions 30

42 EDUCATION VERSUS MASSIFICATION being made by fewer and fewer people, man is maneuvered by the mass media to the point where he believes nothing he has not heard on the radio, seen on television, or read in the newspapers.4 He comes to accept mythical explanations of his reality. Like a man who has lost his address, he is "uprooted." Our new education would have to offer man the means to resist the "uprooting" tendencies of our industrial civilization which accompany its capacity to improve living standards. In our highly technical world, mass production as an organization of human labor is possibly one of the most potent instruments of man's massification. By requiring a man to behave mechanically, mass production domesticates him. By separating his activity from the total project, requiring no total critical attitude toward production, it dehumanizes him. By excessively narrowing a man's specialization, it constricts his horizons, making of him a passive, fearful, nai've being. And therein lies the chief contradiction of mass production: while amplifying man's sphere of participation it simultaneously distorts this amplification by reducing man's critical capacity through exaggerated specialization. One cannot solve this contradiction by defending outmoded and inadequate patterns of production, but by accepting reality and attempting to solve its problems objectively. The answer does not lie in rejection of the machine, but rather in the humanization of man. 5 Our attempt at democracy, already strongly marked by our lack of experience in self-government, was thus further threatened by the difficulties of finding our way from the prevailing state of naive consciousness to some understanding of the significance of the rapid changes in society. For that consciousness could not give the people the conviction of participating in those changes-a conviction indispensable to the development of democracy. In seeking to redirect our educational practice toward the goal of an authentic democracy we could ignore neither our paternalistic cultural traditions nor the new conditions of the transition. After all, these conditions were for the most part, if not distorted by irrationality, favorable to the development of a democratic mentality, since periods of accelerated change are usually attended by a greater flexibility in men's understanding, which may predispose them toward more plastic, democratic forms of life." Brazil was experiencing just such a period of change in its larger centers, from which radio, cinema, television, highway, and air transport carried influences of renewal to the smaller, more backward centers. The 31

43 EDUCATION FOR CRITICAL CONSCIOUSNESS corresponding new transitivity of consciousness was accompanied by the phenomenon of popular rebellion. The new stimuli characteristic of an "opening" society generate a complex of activist mental attitudes. However, the somewhat abrupt emergence of the people from their previous stage of submersion leaves them more or less perplexed by the new experience of participation; and their activism takes the naive and highly emotional form of rebellion. (The reading of Barbu is basic to the understanding of this phenomenon.) I considered that attitude of rebellion as one of the most promising aspects of our political life-not because I espoused it as a form of action, but because it represented a symptom of advancement an introduction to a more complete humanity. For that very reason, it could not be allowed to remain at the predominantly emotional level. My sympathy for the new activism was joined to a recognition of the need to progress from naive rebellion to critical intervention. I was convinced that the Brazilian people could learn social and political responsibility only by experiencing that responsibility, through intervention in the destiny of their children's schools, in the destinies of their trade unions and places of employment through associations, clubs, and councils, and in the life of their neighborhoods, churches, and rural communities by actively participating in associations, clubs, and charitable societies. They could be helped to learn democracy through the exercise of democracy; for that knowledge, above all others, can only be assimilated experientially. More often than not we have attempted to transfer that knowledge to the people verbally, as if we could give lessons in democracy while regarding popular participation in the exercise of power as "absurd and immoral." We lacked-and needed-sufficient courage to discuss with the common man his right to that participation. Nothing threatened the correct development of popular emergence more than an educational practice which failed to offer opportunities for the analysis and debate of problems, or for genuine participation; one which not only did not identify with the trend toward democratization but reinforced our lack of democratic experience. We needed, then, an education which would lead men to take a new stance toward their problems-that of intimacy with those problems, one oriented toward research instead of repeating irrelevant principles. An education of "I wonder: instead of merely, "I do." Vitality, instead of insistence on the transmission of what Alfred North Whitehead has called 32

44 EDUCATION VERSUS MASSIFICATION "inert ideas-that is to say, ideas that are merely received into the mind without being utilised, or tested, or thrown into fresh combinations."7 Critics of the Brazilian taste for verbosity have customarily accused our education of being "theoretical," mistakenly equating theory with verbalism. On the contrary, we lacked theory-a theory of intervention in reality, the analytical contact with existence which enables one to substantiate and to experience that existence fully and completely. In this sense, theorizing is contemplation (although not in the erroneous connotation of abstraction or opposition to reality). Our education was not theoretical, precisely because it lacked this bent toward substantiation, toward invention, toward research. Our traditional curriculum, disconnected from life, centered on words emptied of the reality they are meant to represent,8 lacking in concrete activity, could never develop a critical consciousness. Indeed, its own nai ve dependence on high-sounding phrases, reliance on rote, and tendency toward abstractness actually intensified our nalvete.9 Our verbal culture'" corresponds to our inadequacy of dialogue, investigation, and research. As a matter of fact, I am increasingly convinced that the roots of the Brazilian taste for speeches, for "easy" words, for a well-turned phrase, lie in our lack of democratic experience. The fewer the democratic experiences which lead through concrete participation in reality to critical consciousness of it, the more a group tends to perceive and to confront that reality naively, to represent it verbosely. The less critical capacity a group possesses, the more ingenuously it treats problems and the more superficially it discusses subjects. It was the climate of transition which had finally led us to identify with our reality in a systematic way. I was concerned to take advantage of that climate to attempt to rid our education of its wordiness, its lack of faith in the student and his power to discuss, to work, to create. Democracy and democratic education are founded on faith in men, on the belief that they not only can but should discuss the problems of their country, of their continent, their world, their work, the problems of democracy itself. Education is an act of love, and thus an act of courage. It cannot fear the analysis of reality or, under pain of revealing itself as a farce, avoid creative discussion. The Brazilian tradition, however, has not been to exchange ideas, but to dictate them; not to debate or discuss themes, but to give lectures; not to work with the student, but to work on him, imposing an order to which he has had to accommodate. By giving the student formulas to receive and 33

45 EDUCATION FOR CRITICAL CONSCIOUSNESS store, we have not offered him the means for authentic thought; assimilation results from search, from the effort to re-create and re-invent. The existing form of education simply could not prepare men for integration in the process of democratization, because it contradicted that very process and opposed the emergence of the people into Brazilian public life. And since our cultural history had not provided us even with habits of political and social solidarity appropriate to our democratic form of government, we had to appeal to education as a cultural action by means of which the Brazilian people could learn, in place of the old passivity, new attitudes and habits of participation and intervention.'' We had also to accept the challenge of our alarming rates of illiteracy, and ideally, since a literacy program was only part of the need, to work on it and education for intervention simultaneously. It was true that in some regions of the country universities had made a noteworthy effort to prepare technicians, professionals, researchers, and scientists. But while we could not afford to lose the battle for development, which urgently required an increase in technical personnel at all levels, neither could we afford to lose the battle for the humanization of the Brazilian people. It was essential to harmonize a truly humanist position with technology by an education which would not leave technicians naive and uncritical in dealing with problems other than those of their own specialty. '2 Along these lines, I wish to mention two experiments of the greatest importance in university and graduate instruction: the Instituto Superior de Estudos Brasileiros (ISEB) and the University of Brasilia. Both efforts were frustrated by the military coup of Until the formation of ISEB, the point of reference for the majority of Brazilian intellectuals was Brazil as an object of European or North American thought. As a rule, they thought about Brazil from a non Brazilian point of view; our cultural development was judged according to criteria and perspectives in which Brazil itself constituted a foreign element. The Brazilian intellectual lived in an imaginary world, which he could not transform. Turning his back on his own world, sick of it, he suffered because Brazil was not Europe or the United States. Because he adopted the European view of Brazil as a backward country, he negated Brazil; the more he wanted to be a man of culture, the less he wanted to be a Brazilian. ISEB, which reflected the climate of dis-alienation characteristic of the transitional phase, constituted the negation of this 34

46 EDUCATION VERSUS MASSIFICATION negation by thinking of Brazil as its own reality, as a project. To think of Brazil as a Subject was to identify oneself with Brazil as it really was. The power of the ISEB thinking had its origins in this integration with the newly discovered and newly valued national reality. Two important consequences emerged: the creative power of intellectuals who placed themselves at the service of the national culture, and commitment to the destiny of the reality those intellectuals considered and assumed as their own. It was not by accident that ISEB, although it was not a university, spoke to and was heard by an entire university generation and, although it was not a workers' orga nization, gave conferences in trade unions. Thinking of Brazil as a Subject also characterized the University of Brasflia, which deliberately avoided the importation of alienated models. It did not seek to graduate verbose generalists, nor to prepare "technicistic" specialists, but rather to help transform the Brazilian reality, on the basis of a true understanding of its process. The influence of these two institutions can be understood in terms of their identification with the awakening of the national consciousness, advancing in search of the transformation of Brazil. In this sense, the message and the task of both continue. Notes Seymour Lipset has commented, "The poorer a country and the lower the absolute standard of living of the lower classes, the greater the pressure on the upper strata to treat the lower as vulgar, innately inferior, a lower caste beyond the pale of human society. The sharp difference in the style of living between those at the top and those at the bottom makes this psychologically necessary. Consequently, the upper strata in such a situation tend to regard political rights for the lower strata, particularly the right to share power, as essentially absurd and immoral." Political Man (New York, 1960), p Diagnosis of Our Time (London, 1943 ), p By this I do not mean to say that technology is, of itself, necessarily massifying. 4 See C. Wright Mills, The Power Elite (New York, 1956). 5 On this topic, I recommend the valuable analysis of Emanuel Mounier. Be Not Afraid, Studies in Personalist Sociology (New York, 1954). 6 See Barbu, op. cit. 7 The Aims of Education and Other Essays (New York, 196 7). pp In this regard, see the excellent observations of Fromm on the alienation of language. "... One must always be aware of the danger of the spoken word, 35

47 EDUCATION FOR CRITICAL CONSCIOUSNESS that it threatens to substitute itself for the living experience." Marx's Concept of Man, Erich Fromm, ed. (New York, 1957), p Two generations of Brazilian educators, joined by sociologists concerned with education, have insisted on this point, and on the necessity for a new educational perspective increasingly directed toward development. Those who have published essays and articles on this topic in specialized journals (e.g., the Revista Brasileira de Estudos Pedag6gicos) include Anisio Teixeira, Fernando de Azevedo, Lourenc;o Filho, Carneiro Lean, and others among the older generation; and Roberto Moreira, Arthur Rios, Lauro de Oliveira Lima, Paulo de Almeida Campos, Florestan Fernandes (primarily a sociologist), Guerreiro Ramos (a sociologist), and others among the younger men. Brazilian economists have also made lucid and important forays into this field. Notwithstanding these efforts, the major emphasis of Brazilian education has been that described in this essay. 10 See Fernando de Azevedo, Brazilian Culture, perhaps the best work on this topic published in Brazil. 11 I am aware that education is not a miraculous process capable by itself of effecting the changes necessary to move a nation from one epoch to another. Indeed, it is true that by itself education can do nothing, because the very fact of being "by itself' (i.e., superimposed on its context) nullifies its undeniable power as an instrument of change. Th us one cannot view "education as an absolute value. nor the school as an unconditioned institution," in the words of Luiz de Aguiar Costa Pinto (Sociologia c Desenvolvimento. Rio de Janeiro, 1965). On this subject, see also Roberto Moreira. Educa, ao e Desenvolvimento no Brasil (Rio de Janeiro, 1960). and "Hipoteses e Diretrizes para o Estudo das Resistencias a Mudaw;a SociaL Tendo em Vista a Educac;ao e a InstrU<;ao P(tblica como Condic;oes ou Fat6res," Revista da Associa(ao Pedag6gica de Curitiba (Parana, 1959). 12 As Jacques Maritain has pointed out, "If we remember that the animal is a specialist, and a perfect one, all of its knowing-power being fixed upon a single task to be done, we ought to conclude that an educational program which would only aim at forming specialists ever more perfect in ever more specialized fields, and unable to pass judgment on any matter that goes beyond their specialized competence, would lead indeed to a progressive animalization of the human mind and life." Education at the Crossroads (New Haven, 1943). p

48 Education and Conscientiza ao My concern for the democratization of culture, within the context of fundamental democratization, required special attention to the quantitative and qualitative deficits in our education. In 1964, approximately four million school-age children lacked schools; there were sixteen million illiterates of fourteen years and older. These truly alarming deficits constituted obstacles to the development of the country and to the creation of a democratic mentality. For more than fifteen years I had been accumulating experiences in the field of adult education, in urban and rural proletarian and subproletarian areas. Urban dwellers showed a surprising interest in education, associated directly to the transitivity of their consciousness; the inverse was true in rural areas. (Today, in some areas, that situation is already changing.) I had experimented with-and abandoned-various methods and processes of communication. Never, however, had I abandoned the conviction that only by working with the people could I achieve anything authentic on their behalf. Never had I believed that the democratization of culture meant either its vulgarization or simply passing on to the people prescriptions formulated in the teacher's office. I agreed with Mannheim that "as democratic processes become widespread, it becomes more and more difficult to permit the masses to remain in a state of ignorance."' Mannheim would not restrict his definition of ignorance to illiteracy, but would include the masses' lack of experience at participating and intervening in the historical process. Experiences as the Coordinator of the Adult Education Project of the Movement of Popular Culture in Recife led to the maturing of my early 37

49 EDUCATION FOR CRITICAL CONSCIOUSNESS educational convictions. Through this project, we launched a new institution of popular culture, a "culture circle, " since among us a school was a traditionally passive concept. Instead of a teacher, we had a coordinator; instead of lectures, dialogue; instead of pupils, group participants; instead of alienating syllabi, compact programs that were "broken down" and "codified" into learning units. In the culture circles, we attempted through group debate either to clarify situations or to seek action arising from that clarification. The topics for these debates were offered us by the groups themselves. Nationalism, profit remittances abroad, the political evolution of Brazil, development, illiteracy, the vote for illiterates, democracy, were some of the themes which were repeated from group to group. These subjects and others were schematized as far as possible and presented to the groups with visual aids, in the form of dialogue. We were amazed by the results. After six months of experience with the culture circles, we asked ourselves if it would not be possible to do something in the field of adult literacy which would give us similar results to those we were achieving in the analysis of aspects of Brazilian reality. We started with some data and added more, aided by the Service of Cultural Extension of the University of Recife, which I directed at the time and under whose auspices the experiment was conducted. The first literacy attempt took place in Recife, with a group of five illiterates, of which two dropped out on the second or third day. The participants, who had migrated from rural areas, revealed a certain fatalism and apathy in regard to their problems. They were totally illiterate. At the twentieth meeting, we gave progress tests. To achieve greater flexibility, we used an epidiascope. We projected a slide on which two kitchen containers appeared. "Sugar" was written on one, "poison" on the other. And underneath, the caption: "Which of the two would you use in your orangeade?" We asked the group to try to read the question and to give the answer orally. They answered, laughing, after several seconds, "Sugar." We followed the same procedure with other tests, such as recognizing bus lines and public buildings. During the twenty-first hour of study, one of the participants wrote, confidently, "I am amazed at myself." From the beginning, we rejected the hypothesis of a purely mechanistic literacy program and considered the problem of teaching adults how to read in relation to the awakening of their consciousness. We wished to design a project in which we would attempt to move from naivete to a 38

50 EDUCATION AND CONSCIENTIZA<;Ao critical attitude at the same time we taught reading. We wanted a literacy program which would be an introduction to the democratization of culture, a program with men as its Subjects rather than as patient recipients/ a program which itself would be an act of creation, capable of releasing other creative acts, one in which students would develop the impatience and vivacity which characterize search and invention. We began with the conviction that the role of man was not only to be in the world, but to engage in relations with the world-that through acts of creation and re-creation, man makes cultural reality and thereby adds to the natural world, which he did not make. We were certain that man's relation to reality, expressed as a Subject to an object, results in knowledge, which man could express through language. This relation, as is already clear, is carried out by men whether or not they are literate. It is sufficient to be a person to perceive the data of reality, to be capable of knowing, even if this knowledge is mere opinion. There is no such thing as absolute ignorance or absolute wisdom.' But men do not perceive those data in a pure form. As they apprehend a phenomenon or a problem, they also apprehend its causal links. The more accurately men grasp true causality, the more critical their understanding of reality will be. Their understanding will be magical to the degree that they fail to grasp causality. Further. critical consciousness always submits that causality to analysis; what is true today may not be so tomorrow. Na"ive consciousness sees causality as a static, established fact, and thus is deceived in its perception. Critical consciousness represents "things and facts as they exist empirically, in their causal and circumstantial correlations... naive consciousness considers itself superior to facts, in control of facts, and thus free to understand them as it pleases."4 Magic consciousness, in contrast, simply apprehends facts and attributes to them a superior power by which it is controlled and to which it must therefore submit. Magic consciousness is characterized by fatalism, which leads men to fold their arms, resigned to the impossibility of resisting the power of facts. Critical consciousness is integrated with reality; naive consciousness superimposes itself on reality; and fanatical consciousness, whose pathological na ivete leads to the irrational adapts to reality. It so happens that to every understanding, sooner or later an action corresponds. Once man perceives a challenge, understands it, and recognizes the possibilities of response, he acts. The nature of that action 39

51 EDUCATION FOR CRITICAL CONSCIOUSNESS corresponds to the nature of his understanding. Critical understanding leads to critical action; magic understanding to magic response. We wanted to offer the people the means by which they could supersede their magic or naive perception of reality by one that was predominantly critical, so that they could assume positions appropriate to the dynamic climate of the transition. This meant that we must take the people at the point of emergence and, by helping them move from naive to critical transitivity, facilitate their intervention in the historical process. But how could this be done? The answer seemed to lie: a) in an active, dialogical, critical and criticism-stimulating method; b) in changing the program content of education; c) in the use of techniques like thematic "breakdown" and "codification"' Our method, then, was to be based on dialogue, which is a horizontal relationship between persons. DIALOGUE A with B = communication intercommunication Relation of "empathy" between two "poles" who are engaged in a joint search. MATRix: Loving, humble, hopeful, trusting, critical. Born of a critical matrix, dialogue creates a critical attitude (Jaspers). It is nourished by love, humility, hope, faith, and trust. When the two "poles" of the dialogue are thus linked by love, hope, and mutual trust, they can join in a critical search for something. Only dialogue truly communicates. Dialogue is the only way, not only in the vital questions of the political order. but in all the expressions of our being. Only by virtue of fa ith, however, docs dialogue have pown and meaning: by laith in man and his possibilities. by the faith that I can only become truly myself when other men also become themselves." And so we set dialogue in opposition with the anti-dialogue which was so much a part of our historical-cultural formation. and so present in the climate of transition. 40

52 EDUCATION AND CONSCIENTIZA<;AO A (I over B = communique Relation of "empathy" is broken. ANTI-DIALOGUE MATRtx: Loveless, arrogant. hopeless, mistrustful. acritical. It involves vertical relationships between persons. It lacks love, is therefore acritical. and cannot create a critical attitude. It is self-sufficient and hopelessly arrogant. In anti-dialogue the relation of empathy between the "poles" is broken. Thus, anti-dialogue does not communicate, but rather issues communiques.7 Whoever enters into dialogue does so with someone about something; and that something ought to constitute the new content of our proposed education. We felt that even before teaching the illiterate to read, we could help him to overcome his magic or na ive understanding and to develop an increasingly critical understanding. Toward this end, the first dimension of our new program content would be the anthropological concept of culture-that is, the distinction between the world of nature and the world of culture; the active role of men in and with their reality; the role of mediation which nature plays in relationships and communication among men; culture as the addition made by men to a world they did not make; culture as the result of men's labor, of their efforts to create and re-create; the transcendental meaning of human relationships; the humanist dimension of culture; culture as a systematic acquisition of human experience (but as creative assimilation, not as information-storing); the democratization of culture; the learning of reading and writing as a key to the world of written communication. In short, the role of man as Subject in the world and with the world. From that point of departure, the illiterate would begin to effect a change in his former attitudes, by discovering himself to be a maker of the world of culture, by discovering that he, as well as the literate person, has a creative and re-creative impulse. He would discover that culture is just as much a clay doll made by artists who are his peers as it is the work of a great sculptor, a great painter, a great mystic, or a great philosopher; that culture is the poetry of lettered poets and also the poetry of his own popular songs-that culture is all human creation. 41

53 EDUCATION FOR CRITICAL CONSCIOUSNESS To introduce the concept of culture, first we "broke down" this concept into its fundamental aspects. Then, on the basis of this breakdown, we "codified" (i.e., represented visually) ten existential situations. These situations are presented in the Appendix, together with a brief description of some of the basic elements contained in each. Each representation contained a number of elements to be "decoded" by the group participants, with the help of the coordinator. Francisco Brenand, one of the greatest contemporary Brazilian artists, painted these codifications, perfectly integrating education and art. It is remarkable to see with what enthusiasm these illiterates engage in debate and with what curiosity they respond to questions implicit in the codifications. In the words of Odilon Ribeiro Coutinho, these "detemporalized men begin to integrate themselves in time." As the dialogue intensifies, a "current" is established among the participants, dynamic to the degree that the content of the codifications corresponds to the existential reality of the groups. Many participants during these debates affirm happily and selfconfidently that they are not being shown "anything new, just remembering." "I make shoes," said one, "and now I see that I am worth as much as the Ph.D. who writes books." "Tomorrow," said a street-sweeper in Brasilia, "''m going to go to work with my head high." He had discovered the value of his person. "! know now that I am cultured," an elderly peasant said emphatically. And when he was asked how it was that now he knew himself to be cultured, he answered with the same emphasis, "Because I work, and working, I transform the world."8 Once the group has perceived the distinction between the two worldsnature and culture-and recognized man's role in each, the coordinator presents situations focusing on or expanding other aspects of culture. The participants go on to discuss culture as a systematic acquisition of human experience, and to discover that in a lettered culture this acquisition is not limited to oral transmission, as is the case in unlettered cultures which lack graphic signs. They conclude by debating the democratization of culture, which opens the perspective of acquiring literacy. All these discussions are critical, stimulating, and highly motivating. The illiterate perceives critically that it is necessary to learn to read and write, and prepares himself to become the agent of this learning. To acquire literacy is more than to psychologically and mechanically dominate reading and writing techniques. It is to dominate these 42

54 EDUCATION AND CONSCIENTIZA<;AO techniques in terms of consciousness; to understand what one reads and to write what one understands; it is to communicate graphically. Acquiring literacy does not involve memorizing sentences, words, or syllableslifeless objects unconnected to an existential universe-but rather an attitude of creation and re-creation, a self-transformation producing a stance of intervention in one's context. Thus the educator's role is fundamentally to enter into dialogue with the illiterate about concrete situations and simply to offer him the instruments with which he can teach himself to read and write. This teaching cannot be done from the top down, but only from the inside out. by the illiterate himself, with the collaboration of the educator. That is why we searched for a method which would be the instrument of the learner as well as of the educator, and which, in the lucid observation of a young Brazilian sociologist. 9 "would identify learning content with the learning process." Hence, our mistrust in primers, 10 which set up a certain grouping of graphic signs as a gift and cast the illiterate in the role of the object rather than the Subject of his learning. Primers, even when they try to avoid this pitfall, end by donating to the illiterate words and sentences which really should result from his own creative effort. We opted instead for the use of "generative words, " those whose syllabic elements offer, through re-combination, the creation of new words. Teaching men how to read and write a syllabic language like Portuguese means showing them how to grasp critically the way its words are formed, so that they themselves can carry out the creative play of combinations. Fifteen or eighteen words seemed sufficient to present the basic phonemes of the Portuguese language. The seventeen generative words used in the State of Rio are presented in the Appendix. The program is elaborated in several phases: Phase 1 Researching the vocabulary of the groups with which one is working. This research is carried out during informal encounters with the inhabitants of the area. One selects not only the words most weighted with existential meaning (and thus the greatest emotional content), but also typical sayings, as well as words and expressions linked to the experience of the groups in which the researcher participates. These interviews reveal longings, frustrations, disbeliefs, hopes, and an impetus to participate. During this initial phase the team of educators form rewarding relationships and discover often unsuspected exuberance and beauty in the people's language. 43

55 EDUCATION FOR CRITICAL CONSCIOUSNESS The archives of the Service of Cultural Extension of the University of Recife contain vocabulary studies of rural and urban areas in the Northeast and in southern Brazil full of such examples as the following: "The month of January in Angicos," said a man from the backlands of Rio Grande do Norte, "is a hard one to live through, because January is a tough guy who makes us suffer." (Janeiro em Angicos e duro de se viver, porque janeiro e cabra dana do para judiar de n6s.) "I want to learn to read and write," said an illiterate from Recife, "so that I can stop being the shadow of other people." A man from Florian6polis: "The people have an answer." Another, in an injured tone: "I am not angry (nilo tenho paixilo) at being poor, but at not knowing how to read." "I have the school of the world," said an illiterate from the southern part of the country, which led Professor Jomard de Brito to ask in an essay, "What can one presume to 'teach' an adult who affirms 'I have the school of the world'?" 11 "I want to learn to read and to write so I can change the world," said an illiterate from Sao Paulo, for whom to know quite correctly meant to intervene in his reality. "The people put a screw in their heads," said another in somewhat esoteric language. And when he was asked what he meant. he replied in terms revealing the phenomenon of popular emergence: "That is what explains that you, Professor, have come to talk with me, the people." Such affirmations merit interpretation by specialists, to produce a more efficient instrument for the educator's action.12 The generative words to be used in the program should emerge from this field vocabulary research, not from the educator's personal inspiration, no matter how proficiently he might construct a list. Phase 2 Selection of the generative words from the vocabulary which was studied. The following criteria should govern their selection: a) phonemic richness; b) phonetic difficulty (the words chosen should correspond to the phonetic difficulties of the language, placed in a sequence moving gradually from words of less to those of greater difficulty); c) pragmatic tone, which implies a greater engagement of a word in a given social. cultural and political reality. Professor Jarbas Maciel has commented that "these criteria are contained in the semeiotic criterion: the best generative word is that which combines the greatest possible 'percentage' of the syntactic criteria 44

56 EDUCATION AND CONSCIENTIZA<;AO (phonemic richness, degree of complex phonetic difficulty, 'manipulability' of the groups of signs, the syllables, etc.), the semantic criteria (greater or lesser 'intensity' of the link between the word and the thing it designates), the greater or lesser correspondence between the word and the pragmatic thing designated, the greater or lesser quality of conscientiza(ao which the word potentially carries, or the grouping of sociocultural reactions which the word generates in the person or group using it." 11 Phase 3 The creation of the "codifications": the representation of typical existential situations of the group with which one is working. These representations function as challenges, as coded situation-problems containing elements to be decoded by the groups with the collaboration of the coordinator. Discussion of these codifications will lead the groups toward a more critical consciousness at the same time that they begin to learn to read and write. The codifications represent familiar local situations-which, however, open perspectives for the analysis of regional and national problems. The generative words are set into the codifications, graduated according to their phonetic difficulty. One generative word may embody the entire situation, or it may refer to only one of the elements of the situation. Phase 4 The elaboration of agendas, which should serve as mere aids to the coordinators, never as rigid schedules to be obeyed. Phase 5 The preparation of cards with the breakdown of the phonemic families which correspond to the generative words. 14 A major problem in setting up the program is instructing the teams of coordinators. Teaching the purely technical aspect of the procedure is not difficult; the difficulty lies rather in the creation of a new attitude-that of dialogue, so absent in our own upbringing and education. The coordinators must be converted to dialogue in order to carry out education rather than domestication. Dialogue is an!-thou relationship, and thus necessarily a relationship between two Subjects. Each time the "thou" is changed into an object, an "it," dialogue is subverted and education is changed to deformation. The period of instruction must be followed by dialogical supervision, to avoid the temptation of anti-dialogue on the part of the coordinators. Once the material has been prepared in the form of slides, filmstrips, or posters, once the teams of coordinators and supervisors have been instructed in all aspects of the method and have been given their agendas, the program itself can begin. It functions in the following manner: 45

57 EDUCATION FOR CRITICAL CONSCIOUSNESS The codified situation is projected, together with the first generative word, which graphically represents the oral expression of the object perceived. Debate about its implications follows. Only after the group, with the collaboration of the coordinator, has exhausted the analysis (decoding) of the situation, does the coordinator call attention to the generative word, encouraging the participants to visualize (not memorize) it. Once the word has been visualized, and the semantic link established between the word and the object to which it refers, the word is presented alone on another slide (or poster or photogram) without the object it names. Then the same word is separated into syllables, which the illiterate usually identifies as "pieces." Once the "pieces" are recognized, the coordinator presents visually the phonemic families which compose the word, first in isolation and then together, to arrive at the recognition of the vowels. The card presenting the phonemic families has been called the "discovery card."" Using this card to reach a synthesis, men discover the mechanism of word formation through phonemic combinations in a syllabic language like Portuguese. By appropriating this mechanism critically (not learning it by rote), they themselves can begin to produce a system of graphic signs. They can begin, with surprising ease, to create words with the phonemic combinations offered by the breakdown of a trisyllabic word, on the first day of the program.1 6 For example, let us take the word tijolo (brick) as the first generative word, placed in a "situation" of construction work. After discussing the situation in all its possible aspects, the semantic link between the word and the object it names is established. Once the word has been noted within the situation, it is presented without the object: tijolo. Afterwards: ti-jo-lo. By moving immediately to present the "pieces" visually, we initiate the recognition of phonemic families. Beginning with the first syllable, ti, the group is motivated to learn the whole phonemic family resulting from the combination of the initial consonant with the other vowels. The group then learns the second family through the visual presentation of jo, and finally arrives at the third family. When the phonemic family is projected, the group at first recognizes only the syllable of the word which has been shown: (ta-te-ti-to-tu), (ja-je-ji -jo-ju), (Ia-I e-li -lo-iu) When the participants recognize ti, from the generative word tijolo, it is proposed that they compare it with the other syllables; whereupon they 46

58 EDUCATION AND CONSCIENTIZAc;iio discover that while all the syllables begin the same, they end differently. Thus, they cannot all be called ti. The same procedure is followed with the syllables jo and lo and their families. After learning each phonemic family, the group practices reading the new syllables. The most important moment arises when the three families are presented together: ta-te-ti-to-tu ja-je-ji-jo-ju la-le-li-lo-lu THE DISCOVERY CARD After one horizontal and one vertical reading to grasp the vocal sounds, the group (not the coordinator) begins to carry out oral synthesis. One by one, they all begin to "make" words with the combinations available: 17 tatu (armadillo), /uta (struggle), /ajota (small flagstone), /oja (store), jato (jet), juta (jute), /ote (lot), lula (squid), tela (screen). etc. There are even some participants who take a vowel from one of the syllables, link it to another syllable, and add a third, thus forming a word. For example, they take the i from li, join it to le and add te: Ieite (milk). There are others, like an illiterate from Brasilia, who on the first night he began his literacy program said, "tu jd If" ("you already read"). 18 The oral exercises involve not only learning, but recognition (without which there is no true learning). Once these are completed, the participants begin-on that same first evening-to write. On the following day they bring from home as many words as they were able to make with the combinations of the phonemes they learned. It doesn't matter if they bring combinations which are not actual words-what does matter is the discovery of the mechanism of phonemic combinations. The group itself, with the help of the educator (not the educator with the help of the group), should test the words thus created. A group in the state of Rio Grande do Norte called those combinations which were actual words "thinking words" and those which were not, "dead words". Not infrequently, after assimilating the phonemic mechanism by using the "discovery card, " participants would write words with complex phonemes (tra, nha, etc. ), which had not yet been presented to them. In one of the Culture Circles in Angicos, Rio Grande do Norte, on the fifth 47

59 EDUCATION FOR CRITICAL CONSCIOUSNESS day of discussion, in which simple phonemes were being shown, one of the participants went to the blackboard to write (as he said) "a thinking word." He wrote: "o povo vai resouver os poblemas do Brasil votando conciente"19 ("the people will solve the problems of Brazil by informed voting"). In such cases, the group discussed the text. debating its significance in the context of their reality. How can one explain the fact that a man who was illiterate several days earlier could write words with complex phonemes before he had even studied them? Once he had dominated the mechanism of phonemic combinations, he attempted-and managed-to express himself graphically, in the way he spoke.20 I wish to emphasize that in educating adults, to avoid a rote, mechanical process one must make it possible for them to achieve critical consciousness so that they can teach themselves to read and write. As an active educational method helps a person to become consciously aware of his context and his condition as a human being as Subject. it will become an instrument of choice. At that point he will become politicized. When an ex-illiterate of Angicos, speaking before President Joao Goulart and the presidential staff/' declared that he was no longer part of the mass, but one of the people, he had done more than utter a mere phrase; he had made a conscious option. He had chosen decisional participation, which belongs to the people, resignation of the masses. He had become political. and had renounced the emotional The National Literacy Program of the Ministry of Education and Culture, which I coordinated, planned to extend and strengthen this education work throughout Brazil. Obviously we could not confine that work to a literacy program, even one which was critical rather than mechanical. With the same spirit of a pedagogy of communication, we were therefore planning a post-literacy stage which would vary only as to curriculum. If the National Literacy Program had not been terminated by the military coup, in 1964 there would have been more than 20,000 culture circles functioning throughout the country. In these, we planned to investigate the themes of the Brazilian people. These themes would be analyzed by specialists and broken down into learning units, as we had done with the concept of culture and with the coded situations linked to the generative words. We would prepare filmstrips with these breakdowns as well as simplified texts with references to the original texts. By gathering this thematic material. we could have offered a substantial post-literacy program. Further, by making a catalog of thematic breakdowns and 48

60 EDUCATION AND CONSCIENTIZAI;AO bibliographic references available to high schools and colleges, we could widen the sphere of the program and help identify our schools with our reality. At the same time, we began to prepare material with which we could carry out concretely an education that would encourage what Aldous Huxley has called the "art of dissociating ideas"22 as an antidote to the domesticating power of propaganda. 21 We planned filmstrips, for use in the literacy phase, presenting propaganda-from advertising commercials to ideological indoctrination-as a "problem-situation" for discussion. For example, as men through discussion begin to perceive the deceit in a cigarette advertisement featuring a beautiful, smiling woman in a bikini (i.e., the fact that she, her smile, her beauty, and her bikini have nothing at all to do with the cigarette), they begin to discover the difference between education a d propaganda. At the same time, they are preparing themselves to discuss and perceive the same deceit in ideological or political propaganda;24 they are arming themselves to "dissociate ideas." In fact, this has always seemed to me to be the way to defend democracy, not a way to subvert it. One subverts democracy (even though one does this in the name of democracy) by making it irrational; by making it rigid in order "to defend it against totalitarian rigidity"; by making it hateful, when it can only develop in a context of love and respect for persons; by closing it, when it only lives in openness; by nourishing it with fear when it must be courageous; by making it an instrument of the powerful in the oppression of the weak; by militarizing it against the people; by alienating a nation in the name of democracy. One defends democracy by leading it to the state Mannheim calls "militant democracy" -a democracy which does not fear the people, which suppresses privilege, which can plan without becoming rigid, which defends itself without hate, which is nourished by a critical spirit rather than irrationality. Notes Karl Mannheim, Freedom, Power, and Democratic Planning (New York, 1950). 2 In most reading programs, the students must endure an abysm between their own experience and the contents offered for them to learn. It requires patience indeed, after the hardships of a day's work (or of a day without 49

61 EDUCATION FOR CRITICAL CONSCIOUSNESS work), to tolerate lessons dealing with "wing." "Johnny saw the wing." "The wing is on the bird." Lessons talking of Graces and grapes to men who never knew a Grace and never ate a grape. "Grace saw the grape." 3 No one ignores everything, just as no one knows everything. The dominating consciousness absolutizes ignorance in order to manipulate the so-called "uncultured." If some men are "totally ignorant," they will be incapable of managing themselves, and will need the orientation, the "direction," the "leadership" of those who consider themselves to be "cultured" and "superior." 4 Alvaro Vieira Pinto. Consciencia e Realidade Nacional (Rio de Janeiro, 1961 ). 5 "Breakdown": a splitting of themes into their fundamental nuclei. See Pedagogy of the Oppressed, p. 113ff. "Codification": the representation of a theme in the form of an existential situation. See Pedagogy, pp and pp (Translator's Note.) 6 Karl Jaspers, op. cit. 7 See Jaspers, op. cit. 8 Similar responses were evoked by the programs carried out in Chile. 9 Celso Beisegel, in an unpublished work. 10 I am not opposed to reading texts, which are in fact indispensable to developing the visual-graphic channel of communication and which in great part should be elaborated by the participants themselves. I should add that our experience is based on the use of multiple channels of communication. II "Educac;ao de Adultos e Unificac;ao de Cultura," Estudos Universitarios, Revista de Cultura. Universidade de Recife, 2-4, Luis Costa Lima, Professor of Literary Theory, has analyzed many of these texts by illiterate authors. 13 "A Fundamenta<;ao Te6rica do Sistema Paulo Freire de Educac;ao," Estudos Universitarios, Revista de Cultura, Universidade do Recife, No. IV, See p. 76 of the Appendix. 15 Aurenice Cardoso, "Conscientizac;ao e Alfabetizac;ao-Visao Pratica do Sistema Paulo Freire de Educac;ao de Adultos," Estudos Universitarios, Revista de Cultura, Universidade do Recife, No. IL Generally, in a period of six weeks to two months, we could leave a group of twenty-five persons reading newspapers, writing notes and simple letters, and discussing problems of local and national interest. Each culture circle was equipped with a Polish-made projector, imported at the cost of about $ Since we had not yet set up our own laboratory, a filmstrip cost us about $7-$8. We also used an inexpensive blackboard. The slides were projected on the wall of the house where the culture circle met or. where this was difficult. on the reverse side (painted white) of the blackboard. The Education Ministry imported 35,000 of the projectors, which after the 50

62 EDUCATION AND CONSCIENTIZA<;AO military coup of 1964 were presented on television as "highly subversive." 17 In a television interview, Gilson Amado observed lucidly, "They can do this, because there is no such thing as oral illiteracy." 18 In correct Portuguese, tu jd les. 19 resouver is a corruption of resolver; poblemas a corruption of problemas; the letter sis lacking from the syllable cons. 20 Interestingly enough, as a rule the illiterates wrote confidently and legibly, largely overcoming the natural indecisiveness of beginners. Elza Freire thinks this may be due to the fact that these persons, beginning with the discussion of the anthropological concept of culture, discovered themselves to be more fully human, thereby acquiring an increasing emotional confidence in their learning which was reflected in their motor activity. 21 I wish to acknowledge the support given our efforts by President Goulart, by Ministers of Education Paulo de Tarso and Julio Sambaquy, and by the Rector of the University of Recife, Professor Joao Alfredo da Costa Lima. 22 Ends and Means (New York and London, 1937), p have never forgotten the publicity (done cleverly, considering our acritical mental habits) for a certain Brazilian public figure. The bust of the candidate was displayed with arrows pointing to his head, his eyes, his mouth, and his hands. Next to the arrows appeared the legend: You don't need to think, he thinks for you! You don't need to see, he sees for you! You don't need to talk, he talks for you! You don't need to act, he acts for you! 24 In the campaigns carried out against me, I have been called "ignorant" and "illiterate," "the author of a method so innocuous that it did not even manage to teach him how to read and write." It was said that I was not "the inventor" of dialogue (as if I had ever made such an irresponsible affirmation). It was said that I had done "nothing original" and that I had "plagiarized European or North-American educators," as well as the author of a Brazilian primer. (On the subject of originality, I have always agreed with Dewey, for whom originality does not lie in the "extraordinary and fanciful," but "in putting everyday things to uses which had not occurred to others." Democracy and Education, New York, 1916, p. 187.) None of these accusations has ever wounded me. What does leave me perplexed is to hear or read that I intended to "Bolchevize the country" with my method. In fact, my actual crime was that I treated literacy as more than a mechanical problem, and linked it to conscientiza iio, which was "dangerous." It was that I viewed education as an effort to liberate men, not as yet another instrument to dominate them. 51

63

64 Postscript Today, the task of overcoming our lack of democratic experience through experiences in participation still awaits us, as does the task of superseding the irrational climate which prevails in Brazil. It is too soon to say to what extent this climate can be overcome without provoking larger explosions and even more severe forms of retreat. Possibly the intense emotionality generated by irrational sectarianism can open a new way within the historical process which will lead less rapidly to more authentic and human forms of life for the Brazilian people.

65 Appendix The following drawings represent the "situations" discussed in the culture circles. The originals, by Francisco Brenand, were taken from me; these were done by another Brazilian artist, Vicente de Abreu, now in exile.

66

67

68 APPENDIX FIRST SITUATION Man in the World and with The World, Nature and Culture Through the discussion of this situation-man as a being of relationships-the participants arrive at the distinction between two worlds: that of nature and that of culture. They perceive the normal situation of man as a being in the world and with the world, as a creative and re-creative being who, through work, constantly alters reality. By means of simple questions, such as, "Who made the well? Why did he do it? How did he do it? When?" which are repeated with regard to the other "elements" of the situation, two basic concepts emerge: that of necessity and that of work; and culture becomes explicit on a primary level. that of subsistence. The man made the well because he needed water. And he did it because, relating to the world, he made the latter the object of his knowledge. By work, he submitted the world to a process of transformation. Thus, he made the house, his clothes, his work tools. From that point, one discusses with the group, in obviously simple but critically objective terms, the relations among men, which unlike those discussed previously cannot be either of domination or transformation, because they are relations among Subjects. 57

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70 APPENDIX SECOND SITUATION Dialogue Mediated by Nature In the first situation, we reached the analysis of relationships among men, which, because they are relations among Subjects, cannot be those of domination. Now, confronted by this second situation, the group is motivated to analyze dialogue, interpersonal communication, the encounter of consciousnesses; motivated to analyze the mediation of the world-as transformed and humanized by men-in this communication; motivated to analyze the loving, humble, hopeful, critical, and creative foundation of dialogue. The three situations which follow constitute a series, the analysis of which validates the concept of culture at the same time in which other aspects of real interest are discussed. 59

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72 APPENDIX THIRD SITUATION Unlettered Hunter The debate is initiated by distinguishing in this situation what belongs to nature and what belongs to culture. "Culture in this picture," the participants say, "is the bow, it is the arrow, it is the feathers the Indian wears." And when they are asked if the feathers are not nature, they always answer, "The feathers are nature, while they are on the bird. After man kills the bird, takes the feathers, and transforms them with work, they are not nature any longer. They are culture." (I had the opportunity to hear this reply innumerable times, in various regions of the country.) By distinguishing the historical-cultural period of the hunter from their own, the participants arrive at the perception of what constitutes an unlettered culture. They discover that when man prolongs his arms five to ten yards by making an implement and therefore no longer needs to catch his prey with his hands, he has created culture. By transferring not only the use of the implement, but the incipient technology of its manufacture, to younger generations, he has created education. The participants discuss how education occurs in an unlettered culture, where one cannot properly speak of illiterates. They then perceive immediately that to be illiterate is to belong to an unlettered culture and to fail to dominate the techniques of reading and writing. For some, this perception is dramatic. 61

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74 APPENDIX FOURTH SITUATION Lettered Hunter (Lettered Culture) When this situation is projected, the participants identify the hunter as a man of their culture, although he may be illiterate. They discuss the technological advance represented by the rifle as compared with the bow and arrow. They analyze man's increasing opportunity, because of his work and his creative spirit, to transform the world. They discuss the fact that this transformation, however, has meaning only to the extent that it contributes to the humanization of man, and is employed toward his liberation. They finally analyze the implications of education for development. 63

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76 APPENDIX FIFTH SITUATION The Hunter and the Cat With this situation, the participants discuss the fundamental aspects which characterize the different forms of being in the world-those of men and of animals. They discuss man as a being who not only knows, but knows that he knows; as a conscious being (corpo consciente) in the world; as a consciousness which in the process of becoming an authentic person emerges reflective and intent upon the world. In regard to the preceding series, I will never forget an illiterate from Brasilia who affirmed, with absolute self-confidence, "Of these three, only two are hunters-the two men. They are hunters because they make culture before and after they hunt." (He failed only to say that they made culture while they hunted.) "The third, the cat, does not make culture, either before or after the 'hunt.' He is not a hunter, he is a pursuer." By making this subtle distinction between hunting and pursuing, this man grasped the fundamental point: the creation of culture. The debate of these situations produced a wealth of observations about men and animals, about creative power, freedom, intelligence, instinct, education, and training. 65

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78 APPENDIX SIXTH SITUATION Man Transforms the Material of Nature by His Work "What do we see here? What are the men doing?" the coordinator asks. "They are working with clay," all the participants answer. "They are changing the materials of nature with work," many answer. After a series of analyses of work (Some participants even speak of the "pleasure of making beautiful things," as did one man from Brasilia), the coordinator asks whether the work represented in the situation will result in an object of culture. They answer yes: "A vase." "A jug." "A pot," etc. 67

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80 APPENDIX SEVENTH SITUATION A Vase, the Product of Man's Work Upon the Material of Nature During a discussion of this situation in a Culture Circle of Recife, I was moved to hear a woman say with emotion, "I make culture. I know how to make that." Many participants, referring to the flowers in the vase, say, "As flowers, they are nature. As decoration, they are culture." The esthetic dimension of the product, which in a sense had been awakened from the beginning, is now reinforced. This aspect will be discussed fully in the following situation, when culture is analyzed on the level of spiritual necessity. 69

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82 APPENDIX EIGHTH SITUATION Poetry First the coordinator reads, slowly, the text which has been projected. "This is a poem," everyone usually says. The participants describe the poem as popular, saying that its author is a simple man of the people. They discuss whether or not the poem is culture. "It is culture, just as the vase is," they say, "but it is different from the vase." Through the discussion they perceive, in critical terms, that poetic expression, whose material is not the same, responds to a different necessity. After discussing aspects of popular and erudite artistic expression in various fields, the coordinator rereads the text and submits it to a group discussion. "THE BOMB: The terrible atomic bomb I And radioactivity I Signify terror, I Ruin and calamity. I If war were ended, I And everything were united, I Our world I Would not be destroyed." 71

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84 APPENDIX NINTH SITUATION Patterns of Behavior In this situation, we wish to analyze patterns of behavior as a cultural manifestation, in order subsequently to discuss resistance to change. The picture presents a 8aucho from the south of Brazil and a cowboy from the Brazilian northeast, each dressed in his customary fashion. Starting with the subject of their clothing, the discussion moves on to some of their forms of behavior. Once, in a Culture Circle in the south of Brazil, I heard the following: "We see here traditions of two Brazilian regions-the south and the northeast. Traditions of clothing. But before the traditions were formed, there was a need to dress like that-one with warm clothing, the other with thick leather clothing. Sometimes the need passes but the tradition goes on." 73

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